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THE LAND'S END 



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*W*to>Mte**ft 




IN THE HARBOUR, ST. IVKS 



Frontispiece 



THE LAND'S END 



A NATURALIST'S IMPRESSIONS 
IN WEST CORNWALL 



BY 

W; H. HUDSON 



WITH FORTY-NINE ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
A. L. COLLINS 



NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1908 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 
I. 


Wintering in West Cornwall 




II. 


Gulls at St. Ives . 




III. 


Cornwall's Connemara 




IV. 


Old Cornish Hedges 




V. 


BOLERIUM : THE END OF ALL THE 


Land 


VI. 


Castles by the Sea 


. 


VII. 


The British Pelican 




VIII. 


Bird Life in Winter 




IX. 


The People and the Farms . 


• 


X. 


An Impression of Penzance . 




XI. 


Manners and Morals 


• 


XII. 


Cornish Humour . 




XIII. 


The Poetic Spirit . 




XIV. 


Winter Aspects and a Bird Vii 


3ITATIC 


XV. 


A Great Frost 


• 


XVI. 


A Native Naturalist 


. 


XVII. 


The Coming of Spring 




XVIII. 


Some Early Flowers 


• 


XIX. 


The Furze in its Glory 




XX. 


Pilgrims at the Land's End 
Index 


• 



PACE 


I 


• I0 


• 29 


• 39 


■ 5o 


• *3 


• 74 


• 89 


. 102 


. 121 


• 135 


• J 53 


• 179 


. 204 


. 222 


. 240 


. 261 


• 275 


• 293 


• 3°3 


• 3*9 



About a fourth part of the matter contained in this volume 
has appeared in the Saturday Review and the Speaker, and I 
am obliged to the editors of those journals for their per- 
mission to use it here. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Tn the Harbour, St. Ives 


. Frontispiece 


Boats at St. Ives 


i 


Court Cocking, St. Ives 


4 


Gossips 


9 


An Old Street in St. Ives 


13 


Jackdaws 


17 


Gulls at St. Ives 


19 


A Cornish Fisherman 


21 


v Gulls at St. Ives 


Facing page 22 


Fishermen 


25 


Ivy on Rocks . 


. 29 


A Cornish Stile 


32 


Stone Hedge . 


• 39 


Hedge at St. Ives 


• 47 


Near Land's End 


50, 53 


^Land's End 


Facing page 58 


Fishermen 


. . 6 3 


The Logan Rock 


. . 69 


'Gurnard's Head 


Facing page 70 


Gurnard's Head 


• 74 


Gulls on the Rocks 


. . 89 


x Donkeys on the Moor . 


Facing page 92 


People at the Farm 


102 


The Cornish Celt 


106 



Vlll 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 





PAGE 


Cornish Farm-house 


Facing page 1 14 


Cornish Farm-houses 


. 115 


Penzance . 


121 


Market Jew Street 


. 123 


Newlyn 


• 135 


Mousehole 


• H3 


Small Farm . 


. 153 


Cornish Peasant 


. 161 


Cornish Woman 


. 167 


Norway Lane, St. Ives 


• 177 


Stile at Sennen 


. 179 


Cornish Labourer 


. 191 


Rocks at Zennor 


. 204 


Old Houses, St. Ives 


. 213 


Zennor 


. 222 


' Zennor 


Facing page 224 


Sandhills 


. 240 


Cormorants 


. 261 


Carting Bracken 


• 275 


Furze 


. 293 


Sennen Cove . 


• 303 


-Old Farm, Land's End. 


Fu/i fig page 304 


Near Sennen Cove 


. 309 


Rocks at Land's End 


• 317 




THE LAND'S END 



CHAPTER I 
WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL 

England's " observables " — Why I delayed visiting Cornwall — A 
vision of the Land's End — Flight to St. Ives — Climate — The 
old town — The fishermen— Their love of children — Drowned 
babes — The fishing fleet going out at sunset — Old memories sug- 
gested — Jackdaws at St. Ives — Feeding the birds — A greedy 
sheep-dog — Daws show their intelligence — Daws on the roofs — 
Their morning pastime — Dialogue between two daws. 



K 



NOW," said wise old Fuller, 



most of the 
before thou 



rooms of thy native country 

goest over the threshold thereof. Especially 
seeing England presents thee with so many observ- 
ables." But if we were to follow this advice there 
would be no getting out of the country at all. It is 
too rich in its way : the rooms are too many and too 
well-furnished with observables. Take my case. I 
have been going on rambles about the land for a good 
many years, and though the West Country had the 



2 THE LAND'S END 

greatest attraction for me, I never got over the Tamar, 
nor even so far as Plymouth, simply because 1 had 
not the time, albeit my time was my own. Or be- 
cause there was enough and more than enough to 
satisfy me on this side of the boundary. It is true 
that one desires to see and know all places, but is in no 
hurry to go from a rich to a poor one. I was told by 
every one of my friends that it was the most interest- 
ing county in England, and doubtless it is so to them, 
but I knew it could not be so to me because of the 
comparative poverty of the fauna, seeing that the 
observables which chiefly draw me are the living 
creatures — the wild life — and not hills and valleys and 
granite and serpentine cliffs and seas of Mediterranean 
blue. These are but the setting of the shining living 
gems, and we know the finest of these, which gave 
most lustre to the scene, have been taken out and 
cast away. 

Cornwall to me was just the Land's End — " dark 
Bolerium, seat of storms " — that famous foreland of 
which a vast but misty picture formed in childhood 
remains in the mind, and if I ever felt any strong 
desire to visit Cornwall it was to look upon that 
scene. Then came a day in November, 1905, when, 
having settled to go away somewhere for a season, I all 
at once made up my mind to visit the unknown pen- 
insula and to go straight away to the very end. It 
almost astonished me when I alighted from my train 
at St. Ives to think I had travelled three hundred and 
twenty odd miles with less discomfort and weariness 
than I usually experience on any journey of a hundred. 



WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL 3 

It is common, I think, for lovers of walking to dislike 
the railway. So smoothly had I been carried in this 
flight to the furthest west that I might have been 
sailing in a balloon ; and as for the time occupied it 
would surely be no bad progress for a migrating bird, 
travelling, let us say, from Middlesex to Africa, to 
cover the distance I had come in a little more than 
seven hours ! 

St. Ives is on the north side of the rounded western 
extremity of Cornwall, and from the little green hill, 
called the " Island," which rises above and partly 
shelters the town, you look out upon the wide Atlan- 
tic, the sea that has always a trouble on it and that 
cannot be quiet ; and standing there with the great 
waves breaking on the black granite rocks at your 
feet, they will tell you that there is no land between 
you and America. Nevertheless, after London, I 
wanted no better climate ; for though it rained 
heavily on many days in December and the wind 
blew with tremendous force, the temperature was 
singularly mild, with an agreeable softness in the air 
and sunshine breaking out on the cloudiest days. 
The weather could be described as " delicate " with 
tempestuous intervals. On bright, windless days I 
saw the peacock butterfly abroad and heard that idle 
song of the corn bunting, associated in our minds 
with green or yellow fields and sultry weather. I was 
still more surprised one day late in December at 
meeting with a lively wheatear, flitting from stone to 
stone near the Land's End. This one had discovered 
that it was not necessary to fly all the way to North 



4 THE LAND'S END 

Africa to find a place to winter in. Early in February 
I found the adder abroad. 

The town, viewed from the outside — the old fish- 
ing town, which does not include the numerous 




COURT COCKING, ST. IVES 



villas, terraces, and other modern erections on the 
neighbouring heights — appears very small indeed. It 
is small, for when you once master its intricacies you 
can walk through from end to end in about five or 



WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL 5 

six minutes. But the houses are closely packed, or 
rather jumbled together with the narrowest and crook- 
edest streets and courts in which to get about or up 
and down. They have a look of individuality, like a 
crowd of big rough men pushing and elbowing one 
another for room, and you can see how this haphazard 
condition has come about when you stumble by chance 
on a huge mass of rock thrusting up out of the earth 
among the houses. There was, in fact, just this little 
sheltered depression in a stony place to build upon, 
and the first settlers, no doubt, set their houses just 
where and how they could among the rocks, and when 
more room was wanted more rocks were broken down 
and other houses added until the town as we find it 
resulted. It is all rude and irregular, as if produced 
by chance or nature, and altogether reminds one of a 
rabbit warren or the interior of an ants' nest. 

It cannot be nice to live in such a warren or rook- 
ery, except to those who were born in it ; nevertheless 
it is curiously attractive, and I, although a disliker of 
towns or congeries of houses, found a novel pleasure 
in poking about it, getting into doorways and chance 
openings to be out of the way of a passing cart which 
as a rule would take up the whole width of the street. 
Outside the houses hung the wet oilskins and big sea- 
boots to dry, and at the doors women with shawls 
over their heads stand gossiping. W T hen the men are 
asleep or away and the children at school these appear 
to be the only inhabitants, except the cats. You find 
one at every few yards usually occupied with the 
head of a mackerel or herring. The appearance was 



6 THE LAND'S END 

perhaps even better by night when the narrow 
crooked ways are very dark except at some rare spot 
where a lamp casts a mysterious light on some quaint 
old corner building and affords a glimpse into a dimly- 
seen street beyond ending in deep gloom. 

In this nest or hive are packed about eight hundred 
fishermen with their wives and children, their old 
fathers and mothers, and other members of the com- 
munity who do not go in the boats. The fishermen 
are the most interesting in appearance ; it is a relief, 
a positive pleasure to see in England a people clothed 
not in that ugly dress which is now so universal, but 
in one suitable to their own life and work — their 
ponderous sea-boots and short shirt-shaped oilies of 
many shades of colour from dirty white and pale 
yellow to deep reds and maroons. In speech and 
manners they are rough and brusque, and this, too, 
like their dress and lurching gait, comes, as it were, 
by nature ; for of all occupations, this of wresting a 
poor and precarious livelihood from the wind- vexed 
seas under the black night skies in their open boats is 
assuredly the hardest and most trying to a man's 
temper. The navvy and the quarryman, the labourer 
on the land, here where the land is half rock, even 
the tin-miner deep down in the bowels of the earth, 
have a less discomfortable and anxious life. That 
they are not satisfied with it one soon discovers ; 
Canada calls them, and Africa, and other distant 
lands, and unhappily, as in most places, it is always 
the best men that go. Possibly this accounts for the 
change for the worse in the people which some have 



WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL 7 

noted in recent years. Nevertheless they are a good 
people still, righteous in their own peculiar way, and 
so independent that in bad times, as when the fishing 
fails, hunger and cold are more endurable to them than 
charity. They are a clannish people, and it is conse- 
quently not to be wondered at that they have no sub- 
scription clubs or friendly societies of any kind to aid 
them in times of want and sickness such as are now 
almost universal among the working classes. These 
benefits of our civilisation will doubtless come to 
them in time : then their clannishness — the old " One 
and All " spirit of Cornishmen generally — being no 
longer needed, will decay. It is after all but another 
word for solidarity, the strong, natural, or family 
bond which unites the members of a community 
which was once, in ruder ages, everywhere, to make 
social life possible, and has survived here solely 
because of Cornwall's isolated position. Unfortu- 
nately we cannot make any advance — cannot gain 
anything anywhere without a corresponding loss 
somewhere. Will it be better for this people when 
the change comes — when the machine we call " civili- 
sation " has taken the place of the spirit of mutual 
help in the members of the community ? 'Tis an 
idle question, since we cannot have two systems of 
life. At present, in our " backward " districts, we 
have two, but they are in perpetual conflict, and one 
must overcome the other ; and if there be any beauti- 
ful growths in the old and unfit, which is passing 
away, they must undoubtedly perish with it. 

One of the most pleasing traits of the Cornish 



8 THE LAND'S END 

people, which is but one manifestation of the spirit I 
have been speaking about, is their love for little 
children. Nowhere in the kingdom, town or country, 
do you see a brighter, happier, better-dressed company 
of small children than here in the narrow stony ways 
of the old fishing town. The rudest men exhibit a 
strange tenderness towards their little ones ; and not 
only their own, since they regard all children with a 
kind of parental feeling. An incident which occurred 
in the early part of December, and its effects on the 
people, may be given here as an illustration. One 
morning when the boats came in it was reported that 
one of the men had been lost. " Poor fellow ! " was 
all that was said about it. And that is how it is all 
the world over among men who have dangerous occu- 
pations : the loss of a comrade is a not uncommon 
experience, and the shock is very slight and quickly 
vanishes. But there was no such indifference when, 
two or three days later, one of the herring-boats 
brought in the corpse of a small child which had been 
fished up in the Bay — a pretty little well-nourished 
boy, decently dressed, aged about two years and a half. 
Where the child belonged and how it came to be in 
the sea was not discovered until long afterwards, but 
the intensity of the feeling displayed was a surprise 
to me. For several days little else was talked of 
both in St. Ives and the villages and farms in the 
neighbourhood, and they talked of it, both men and 
women, with tears in their voices as though the death 
of this unknown child had been a personal loss. 

This incident served to recall others, of St. Ives 



WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL 9 

children lost and drowned in past years, especially 
this very pathetic one of three little things who went 
out to pick flowers one afternoon and were lost. 
They were two sisters, aged eight and nine respec- 
tively, and their little brother, about six or seven 




J 



GOSSIPS 



years old. They rambled along the rough heath by 
Carbis Bay to the Towans, near Lelant, where, climb- 
ing about among the sand-hills, they lost all sense of 
direction. There meeting a man who spoke roughly 
to them and ordered them home they became terrified 
and ran away to the sea-front, and, climbing down the 



io THE LAND'S END 

cliff, hid themselves in a cave they found there. By 
and by it began to grow dark, and there were sounds 
above as of loud talking and shouts and of a galloping 
horse, all which added to their fear and caused them 
to go further into their dark wet house of refuge. 
They did not know, poor children, that the cries 
were uttered by those who were seeking for them ! 
After dark the tide rose and covered the sandy floor 
of the cave, and to escape it they climbed on to a rocky 
shelf where they could keep dry, and there huddled 
together to keep warm, and being very tired, they 
eventually fell asleep. In the morning when it grew 
light the sisters woke, stiff and cold, to find that their 
poor little brother had fallen from the ledge in his sleep 
and had been carried out by the sea. His body was 
recovered later. The two survivors, now middle-aged 
women, still live in the town. 

The most interesting hour of the day at St. Ives 
was in the afternoon or evening, the time depending 
on the tide, when the men issued from their houses 
and came lurching down the little crooked stone 
streets and courts to the cove or harbour to get the 
boats out for the night's fishing. It is a very small 
harbour in the corner of the bay — a roughly shaped 
half-moon with two little stone piers for horns, with 
just room enough inside to accommodate the fleet of 
about 150 boats. The best spectacle is when they are 
taken out at or near sunset in fair weather, when the 
subdued light gives a touch of tenderness and mystery 
to sea and sky, and the boats, singly, in twos and 
threes, and in groups of half a dozen, drift out from 



WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL n 

the harbour and go away in a kind of procession over 
the sea. The black forms on the moving darkening: 
water and the shapely deep-red sails glowing in the 
level light have then a beauty, an expression, which 
comes as a surprise to one unaccustomed to such a 
scene. The expression is due to association — to vague 
suggestions of a resemblance in this to other scenes. 
We may be unable to recall them ; the feeling returns 
but without the mental image of the scene which 
originally produced it. It was not until I had watched 
the boats going out on two or three successive evenings 
that an ancient memory returned to me. 

Sitting or walking by the margin of some wide 
lake or marsh in a distant land, I am watching a com- 
pany of birds of some large majestic kind— stork, 
wood-ibis, or flamingo — standing at rest in the shallow 
water, which reflects their forms. By and by one of 
the birds steps out of the crowd and moves leisurely 
away, then, slowly unfolding his broad wings, launches 
himself on the air and goes off, flying very low over 
the water. Another follows, then, after an interval, 
another, then still others, in twos and threes and half- 
dozens, until the last bird has opened his wings and 
the entire flock is seen moving away in a loose pro- 
cession over the lake. 

Just in that way did the crowd of boats move by 
degrees from their resting-place, shake out their 
wing-like sails, and stream away over the sea. 

That was one scene ; there were faint suggestions 
of many others, only a few of which I could recover ; 
one was of large, dark red-winged butterflies, seen at 



12 THE LAND'S END 

rest with closed wings, congregated on wind-swayed 
reeds and other slender plants. It was the shape and 
deep red colour of the sails and the way they hung 
from the masts and cordage which restored this 
butterfly picture to my mind. And in every instance 
in which a resemblance could be traced it turned out 
to be to some natural and invariably to a beautiful 
object or scene. The spectacle had, in fact, that 
charm, which is so rare in man's work, of something 
wholly natural, which fits into the scene and is part 
and parcel with nature itself. 

In buildings we get a similar effect at the two 
extremes — in the humblest and the highest work of 
man's hands ; in the small old thatched and rose- and 
creeper-covered cottage in perfect harmony with its 
surroundings, and in ancient majestic castles and 
cathedrals, in which the sharp lines and contours have 
been blurred by decay of the material and the whole 
surface weathered and stained with lichen and alga 
and in many cases partially draped with ivy. 

It struck me before I had been long in St. Ives that, 
in spite of the delightful mildness of the climate and 
the charm of the place, nobody but myself was winter- 
ing there. The lodging-houses were quite empty ; 
the people were the natives or else the artists, who 
form a pretty numerous colony. The few others 
to be seen were visitors for the day from Penzance, 
Falmouth, or some other spot in the " Cornish 
Riviera." This was not a cause of regret, seeing 
there were birds for society, especially that old fav- 
ourite, the jackdaw. Doubtless he is to be seen there 




AN OLD STREET IN ST. IVES 



i 4 THE LAND'S END 

all the year round as he is so common a town bird all 
over the country, but at St. Ives many of the cliff- 
breeding daws settle down regularly for the winter 
and exist very comfortably on the fish and other 
refuse thrown into the streets. Very soon I estab- 
lished a sort of friendship with a few of these birds ; 
for birds I must have, in town or country — free birds 
I mean, as the captive bird only makes me melancholy 
— and in winter I feed them whether they are in want or 
not. It is an old habit of mine, first practised in early 
life in June and July, the cold winter months in the 
southern hemisphere, in a land where the English 
sparrow was not. Now, unhappily, he is there and a 
great deal too abundant. I fed a better sparrow in 
those vanished days, smaller and more prettily shaped 
than our bird, with a small crest on his head and a 
sweet delicate little song. But in England one really 
gets far more pleasure from feeding the birds on 
account of the number of different species which are 
willing to be our pensioners. At St. Ives I first 
stayed at a house in The Terrace facing the sea-front, 
and there were no gardens there, so that I had to feed 
them out in the road. First there were only sparrows, 
then a pair of jackdaws turned up, and soon others 
joined them until I had about a score of them. By 
and by a very big shaggy sheep-dog, belonging to a 
carter, discovered that there was food to be got at 
eight o'clock at that spot in the road, and he too 
came very punctually every day and thoughtlessly 
gobbled it all up himself. After two or three days of 
this sort of thing, I felt that it ought not to be allowed 



WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL 15 

to continue, and as the daws were of the same mind and 
loyally seconded my efforts to stop it we were soon 
successful. My plan was to go out and scatter the 
scraps and crusts far and wide over the road, and 
while the greedy dog galloped about from crust to 
crust the daws, hovering overhead, dropped down 
and snatched them one by one away before he could 
reach them. 

Later, when leaving St. Ives, I asked the landlady 
to explain to the birds on the following morning the 
reason of there being nothing for them, and to request 
them to go quietly away. They were very intelligent, 
I said, and would understand ; but on my return, a 
month later, she said they had not understood the 
message, or had not believed her, as they had con- 
tinued to come for several mornings, and had seemed 
very much put out. It was plain they had kept an 
eye on that house during my absence, for on going 
out with scraps on the morning after my return they 
promptly reappeared in full force on the scene. 

There are few persons to feed the birds in those 
parts, and those few, I fancy, are mostly visitors from 
other counties. It amused me to see how the natives 
regarded my action ; the passer-by would stop and 
examine the scraps or crusts, then stare at me, and 
finally depart with a puzzled expression on his coun- 
tenance, or perhaps smiling at the ridiculous thing he 
had witnessed. 

The following winter (1906-7) 1 found a lodging 
in another part of the town, in a terrace rather high 
up, where I could look from my window at the Bay 



1 6 THE LAND'S END 

over the tiled roofs of the old town. Here I had a 
front garden to feed the birds in, and, better still, the 
entire jackdaw population of St. Ives, living on the 
roofs as is their custom, were under my eyes and could 
be observed very comfortably. 1 discovered that 
they filled up a good deal of their vacant time each 
morning in visiting the chimneys from which smoke 
issued, just to inform themselves, as it seemed, what 
was being cooked for breakfast. This was their pas- 
time and watching them was mine. Numbers of daws 
would be seen, singly, in pairs, and in groups of three 
or four to half a dozen, sitting on the roofs all over 
the place. As the morning progressed and more and 
more chimneys sent out smoke, they would become 
active visiting the chimneys, where, perching on the 
rims, they would put their heads down to get the 
smell rising from the pot or frying-pan on the fire 
below. If a bird remained long perched on a chim- 
ney-pot, his neighbours would quickly conclude that 
he had come upon a particularly interesting smell and 
rush off" to share it with him. When the birds were 
too many there would be a struggle for places, and 
occasionally it happened that a puff of dense black 
smoke would drive them all off together. 

A dozen incidents of this kind could be witnessed 
any morning, and I was as much entertained as if I 
had been observing not birds but a lot of lively, 
tricky little black men with grey pates inhabiting the 
roofs. One morning when watching a pair perched 
facing each other on a chimney-top their movements 
and gestures made me imagine that 1 knew just what 



WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL 17 

they were saying. First one leaning over the rim 
would thrust his head down into the smoke and keep 
it there some time, the other would follow suit, then 




JACKDAWS 



pulling themselves up they would stare at each other 
for half a minute, then poke their heads down again. 
" A funny smell that ! " one says. " I can't quite 
make it out, and yet I seem to know what it is." 



1 8 THE LAND'S END 

" Red herring," suggests the other. 

" Nonsense ! I know that smell well enough. But 
I grant you it's just a little like it, only — what shall I 
say ? — this is a thicker sort of smell." 

" I'll just have another good sniff," says the second 
bird. " H'm ! I wonder if it's some very old pil- 
chards they've found stowed away in some corner ? " 

" No," says the first bird, pulling his head out of 
the smoke and blinking his wicked little grey eyes. 
" It isn't pilchards. Just one more sniff. I've got it ! 
A very old piece of dry salted conger they're broiling 
on the coals." 

" By Jove, you're right this time ! It is a good 
thick smell ! I only wish I could drop down the flue, 
snatch up that bit of conger, and get clear away 
with it." 

" You'd soon have a jolly lot of jacks after you, I 
fancy. Hullo ! what are those fellows making such 
a to-do about — down there on that chimney-pot ? 
Let's go and find out." 

And away they fly, to drop down and fight for 
places among the others. 



/***£' 







CHAPTER II 
GULLS AT ST. IVES 

Gulls in fishing harbours — Their numbers and beautiful appearance at 
St. Ives— Different species — Robbing the fishermen — How they are 
regarded — The Glaucous gull or Burgomaster — Cause of the 
fishermen's feeling— A demonstration of hungry gulls — A gull 
tragedy. 

TO a bird lover the principal charm of St. Ives 
is in its gull population. Gulls greatly out- 
number all the other wild birds of the town 
and harbour put together, and though they have not 
the peculiar fascination of the jackdaw, which is due 
to that bird's intelligence and amusing rascalities, 
they are very much more beautiful. 

Of all feathered creatures gulls are ever the quickest 
to discover food thrown accidentally in their way by 
man. In many lands, crows, vultures, carrion hawks, 
and omnivorous feeders generally acquire the habit of 
watching the movements of the human hunter and of 
travellers in desert places for the sake of his leavings. 

'9 



20 THE LAND'S END 

In the gulls this habit is universal ; their " wide eyes 
that search the sea " have discovered that where there 
is a ship or boat something may be picked up by 
following it, and in all lands where there is a plough 
to share the soil the plougher is pretty sure to have 
a following of gulls at his heels. In harbours they 
are much at home, but are especially attracted to a 
fishing town, and it would be hard to find one where 
they make a better appearance than at St. Ives. But 
not solely on account of their numbers and tameness, 
since they congregate at all fishing stations and are 
just as tame and abundant elsewhere. At St. Ives 
they make a better show because of the picturesque 
character of the place itself — the small harbour, open 
to the wide blue bay and the Atlantic, crowded 
with its forest of tall slim masts resembling a 
thick grove of larches in winter, while for back- 
ground there is the little old town, its semicircle of 
irregular quaint and curious stone-grey and tile-red 
buildings. 

The gulls that congregate here are of several kinds: 
on most days one can easily count five species, the 
most abundant being the herring and the lesser black- 
backed gulls, and with them you generally see one or 
two great black-backs. Then there are the two 
small species, the common and the black-headed gull. 
These, when it comes to a general scramble for the 
small fishes and other waste, are mere pickers-up of 
unconsidered trifles on the outskirts of the whirlwind 
of wings, the real fighting area, and their guttural 
cries — a familiar sound to Londoners in winter — are 



GULLS AT ST. IVES 



21 



drowned in the tempest of hard, piercing, and grinding 
metallic noises emitted by the bigger birds. 

All this noise and fury and scurry of wings of 
innumerable white forms, mixed up with boats and 
busy shouting men, comes to be regarded by the 
people concerned as a necessary part of the whole 
business, and the bigger the bird crowd and the louder 
the uproar the better they appear to like it. For their 
gulls are very dear to them. 

One morning when looking on and enjoying the 
noisy scene, I saw 
one of the smaller 
boats left unatten- 
ded by the men. 
They had thrown 
a canvas over the 
fish, but this the 
gulls soon succeeded 
in pulling aside ; 
then those overhead 
converging poured 
down in the form of 
a white column, and 
the boat was covered 
from stem to stern 
with a mass of birds 
madly fighting for 

the herrings. The men in other boats close by 
looked on and laughed ; by and by they began shout- 
ing, but this had no effect, and the struggling and 
feasting went on until the master of the boat returned 



ftic 




A CORNISH FISHERMAN 



22 THE LAND'S END 

and scared them off". He said afterwards that they 
had devoured half his catch, yet the men who had 
been standing by looking on had made no real attempt 
to save the fish. 

The gulls know their friends very well ; with the 
man in sea-boots and oilskins they are tamer than any 
domestic bird ; they will take food from his hands 
and love to settle to rest on the boats and to sit 
perched like swallows on the mast top. They have 
not the same confidence towards strangers, and they 
positively dislike small boys. When boys appear 
they fly away to a distance. One evening, the men 
being out of sight, I found three urchins amusing 
themselves by throwing stones at a few small gulls 
flying about the sand in search of scraps. " What 
would you get," I asked them, " if one of the men 
caught you stoning the gulls ? " " Oh ! " cried the 
biggest of the three, drawing his head down between 
his shoulders in a most expressive way, "we'd get our 
ears well cuffed." " Very well," 1 said, " I'm here in 
their place to-day to look after the birds." In a 
moment they dropped their stones and taking to their 
heels vanished in a neighbouring court. 

Yet these very boys in a few years' time, when they 
will be in the boats too, will have the same feeling as 
the men, and be ready to inflict the severest punish- 
ment on any youngster they may catch throwing a 
pebble at one of their sacred birds ! 

One day I caught sight of a large ivory-white gull 
of an unknown species sitting on the water some 
distance from the shore, and was very anxious to see 




GULLS AT ST. IVES 



To face page 22 



GULLS AT ST. IVES 23 

more of this bird. Two or three days later I was 
with an artist friend in his studio, and was standing at 
the window which looks upon a sandy cove at the 
back of the town. By and by a wave of the incom- 
ing tide threw up a dead dogfish about three feet 
long on the white sand within fifty yards of the 
window. Scarcely was the fish left by the retiring 
water before a big white-winged gull dropped down 
upon it — the very bird I had been hoping to encoun- 
ter again ! There it remained, trying to tear a hole 
in the tough skin, fully five minutes before the re- 
turning water took the fish away, so that I had a 
good chance of examining it through a binocular. It 
was considerably bigger than the herring gull, with a 
much more formidable beak and altogether a bolder 
appearance, and the entire plumage was of a chalky 
white. It was a Glaucous gull — the famous Burgo- 
master of the Arctic Sea, probably a female in im- 
mature plumage. In a few moments other gulls 
dropped down to get a bite — three herring and one 
black-backed gull with some smaller gulls — but they 
were not allowed to taste the fish. When one 
attempted to come near it the white gull looked 
fixedly at him a couple of moments, then drawing in 
its head suddenly tipped its beak upwards — an 
expressive gull gesture corresponding to the snarl 
of a dog when he is feeding and other dogs approach 
him. It produced a marked effect on the other gulls; 
perhaps the Burgomaster, a rare visitor to our seas, 
was known, from hearsay, to them as a great tyrant. 
Talking of this noble stranger to one of the fisher- 



24 THE LAND'S END 

men, I remarked that if a bird collector happened to 
be about he would certainly have that bird even if 
compelled to fire into the whole crowd of gulls to 
kill it. "Then," he returned, "perhaps our men 
would kill him ! " 

The curious point is that this feeling should exist 
and be so strong in a people who have little or no 
regard for birds generally. The most religious of 
men, they are at the same time the least humane. 
The gull they tell you is the fisherman's friend ; but 
other sea-birds, which he kills without compunction — 
the gannet, for instance — are useful to him in the 
same way as the gull. They also say that the gulls 
keep the harbour sweet and clean ; an explanation 
probably invented for them by some stranger within 
their gates. The fact is, they cherish an affection 
for the gulls, though they refuse to confess it, and, 
being what they are by race, this feeling has ac- 
quired the character of a superstition. To injure 
a gull wilfully is to invite disaster. It may be 
that the origin of the feeling is simply the fact that 
gulls gather in vociferous crowds round the boats and 
in the harbour when the fishing has prospered, and in 
this way become associated in the fisherman's mind 
with all those agreeable ideas or images and emotions 
connected with a good catch— smiles and cheerful 
words of greeting in the home, with food in abun- 
dance, money for the rent and for needed clothes and 
other good things for the little ones. 

On the other hand we may have here a survival of 
an older superstition, a notion that gulls are in some 



GULLS AT ST. IVES 



25 



degree supernatural beings, perhaps drowned mariners 
and fishermen returned in bird forms to haunt their 
ancient homes and associate with their human fellow- 
creatures. The feeling is certainly very strong : I 
was told that some of the fishermen even in their 
times of greatest scarcity will always manage at meal- 
time to put a few crusts and scraps of food into their 
pockets to throw to the gulls in the harbour. 




FISHERMEN 



From all this it might appear that the gulls at 
St. Ives are having an exceedingly good time, but 
they are not wholly happy — not happy every day, as 
they very soon let me know. The fishermen, like 
the Cornish people generally, are strict Sabbatarians, 
and from Friday night or Saturday morning, when 
the boats come in, they do not go out again until the 
following Monday evening. In a neighbouring fish- 



26 THE LAND'S END 

ing village the boats are taken out at the stroke of 
twelve on Sunday night. The St. Ives men do not 
like to run it so fine, and the gulls are never able to 
understand this long break in the fishing. On the 
Saturday, after feeding, they retire to the sea and the 
rocks, where they pass the day comfortably enough, 
sitting with beaks to the wind and digesting a plenti- 
ful meal. On Sunday morning they congregate in 
the harbour with empty stomachs only to find the 
boats lying empty and idle and all the men 
away; they do not like it, but they put up with it, 
and by and by loiter off to pick up what they can for 
themselves, or to wait patiently on the sea and the 
rocks, through another long twenty-four hours. On 
Monday morning they are very hungry indeed, and 
come in with stomachs that scream for food. 
They come in their thousands, and still nothing for 
them — the boats lying empty and idle, the men still 
at home in bed and no movement in the harbour ! 
They cannot and they will not endure it. Then 
begins a tremendous demonstration of the unem- 
ployed. On my first Monday I was roused from 
slumber before daylight by the uproar. It was not 
now that tempest and tangle of broken, squealing and 
grinding metallic noises emitted by the big gulls when 
they are in numbers fighting over their food, it was 
the loud long wailing call of the bird, incessantly 
repeated, a thousand wailing like one, and at intervals 
the dreary laughter-like chorus of short reiterated 
cries ; then again the insistent wailing calls. When 
it became light they could be seen as a white cloud 



GULLS AT ST. IVES 27 

hanging over the harbour, the birds moving round 
and round over the idle boats in endless procession, 
and this went on for about an hour, when, finding 
that nothing came of it all, they went sadly away. 

On yet another morning I was awakened before 
daylight, but this was a happy occasion, the boats 
having come in during the small hours laden with 
the biggest catch of the season. The noise of the 
birds made me get up and dress in a hurry to go and 
find out what it was all about. For an hour and a 
half I stood at the end of the little stone pier watch- 
ing the cloud and whirlwind of vociferous birds, and 
should have remained longer but for a singular acci- 
dent — a little gull tragedy — which brought a sudden 
end to the feast. The men in fifty boats while occu- 
pied in disengaging the fish from the nets were con- 
tinually throwing the small useless fishes away, and 
these, falling all round in the water, brought down a 
perpetual rush and rain of gulls from overhead ; 
everywhere they were frantically struggling on the 
water, while every bird rising with a fish in his beak 
was instantly swooped down upon and chased by the 
others. Now one of the excited birds while rushing 
down by chance struck a rope or spar and fell into 
the water at the side of a boat, about forty yards 
from where I was standing. It was a herring gull in 
mature plumage, and its wing was broken. The 
bird could not understand this ; it made frantic 
efforts to rise, but the whole force exerted being in 
one wing merely caused it to spin rapidly round and 
round. These struggles eventually caused the shat- 



28 THE LAND'S END 

tered bone to break through the skin ; the blood 
began to flow and redden the plumage on one side. 
This was again and again washed off in the succeed- 
ing struggles to rise, but every time a pause came 
the feathers were reddened afresh. At length the 
poor thing became convinced that it could no longer 
fly, that it could only swim, and at once ceasing to 
struggle it swam away from the boats and out to- 
wards the open bay. Hardly had it gone a dozen 
yards from the boat-side where it had fallen before 
some of the gulls flying near observed it for the first 
time, and dropping to within three or four yards of 
the surface hovered over it. Then a strange thing 
happened. Instantly, as if a shot had been fired to 
silence them, the uproar in the harbour ceased ; the 
hundreds of gulls fighting on the water rose up 
simultaneously to join the cloud of birds above, and 
the whole concourse moved silently away in one 
direction, forming a dense crowd above the wounded 
bird. In this formation, suspended at a height of 
about thirty yards over and moving with him, they 
travelled slowly out into the middle of the bay. 

The silence and stillness in the harbour seemed 
strange after that tempest of noise and motion, for 
not a bird had remained behind, nor did one return 
for at least half an hour ; then in small companies 
they began to straggle back to resume the interrupted 
feast. 







CHAPTER III 
CORNWALL'S CONNEMARA 

Aspect of the country — Gilpin on Cornish scenery — The farm-houses 
— Footpaths and stiles — Cattle and pigs — A friendly sow— Dogs 
and foxes — Stony fields — Farmers' love of their holdings — An 
old farmer. 

THE coast country at the end or the western 
extremity of Cornwall presents an aspect wild 
and rough as any spot in England. The 
eighty-miles-long county, which some one compares 
to a malformed knobbly human leg in shape, narrows 
down near its termination to a neck or ankle of land 
no more than six or seven miles wide, with St. Ives 
Bay on one (the north) side, and Mount's Bay on the 
other, with its group of places of famous or familiar 
names — Mousehole, Newlyn, Penzance, Marazion 
and St. Michael's Mount. Then the land broadens 
again, forming that rounded bit of country, the 

29 



30 THE LAND'S END 

westernmost part of England, containing seventy-five 
or eighty square miles of hilly and moorland country, 
in great part treeless, with a coastline, from bay to 
bay, of about thirty miles. Following the coast, one 
does not wish them more : the most enthusiastic 
lover of an incult nature, who delights in forcing his 
way over rocky barriers and through thickets of 
furze, bogs and rills innumerable, will find these thirty 
miles as satisfying as any sixty elsewhere. And the 
roughest, therefore most exhilarating, portion of the 
coast is that between St. Ives and Land's End, a dis- 
tance of about twenty miles. This strip of country 
has been called the Connemara of Cornwall. William 
Gilpin, that grand old seeker after the picturesque at 
the end of the eighteenth century, once journeyed 
into Cornwall, but got no further than Bodmin, as he 
saw nothing but " a barren and naked country, in all 
respects as uninteresting as can well be conceived," 
and he was informed that west of Bodmin it was no 
better. It is, indeed, worse, and one wonders what 
his feelings would have been had he persevered to 
the very end — to rough "Connemara" and flat, naked 
Bolerium ! His strictures on the scenery would have 
amused the present generation. For all that repelled 
Gilpin and those of his time in nature, the barren or 
" undecorated," as he would say, the harsh and savage 
and unsuited to human beings, now most attracts us. 
And of all places inhabited by man this coast country 
is the most desert-like and desolate in appearance. 
The black, frowning, wave-beaten cliffs on the one 
hand, the hills and moors on the other, treeless, 



CORNWALL'S CONNEMARA 31 

strewn abundantly with granite boulders, rough with 
heath and furze and bracken, the summits crowned 
with great masses of rock resembling ancient ruined 
castles. Midway between the hills and the sea, halt 
a mile or so from the cliffs, are the farms, but the 
small houses and walled fields on the inhabited strip 
hardly detract from the rude and savage aspect of the 
country. Nature will be Nature here, and man, like 
the other inhabitants of the wilderness, has adapted 
himself to the conditions. The badgers have their 
earths, the foxes their caverns in the rocks, and the 
linnet, yellow-hammer, and magpie hide their nests, 
big and little, in the dense furze bushes : he in like 
manner builds his dwelling small and low, shelter- 
ing as best he can in any slight depression in the 
ground, or behind thickets of furze and the rocks he 
piles up. The small naked stone farm-house, with its 
little outbuildings, corn - stacks, and wood piles 
huddling round it, seem like a little flock of goats 
drawn together for company and shelter in some rough 
desert place on a cold windy day. Looking from a 
hill-top on one of the small groups of buildings — and 
in some instances two or three farms have clubbed 
their houses together for better protection from the 
blast — they resemble toy houses, and you have the 
fancy that you could go down and pick them up and 
put them in your pocket. 

The coast road, running from village to village, 
winding much, now under now over the hills, comes 
close to some of the farms and leaves others at a 
distance ; but all these little human centres are united 



32 



THE LANDS END 



by a footpath across the fields. It is very pleasant to 
follow this slight track, this connecting thread, which 
brings to mind Richard Carew's account of the poor 
Cornish farmers of his time, three centuries ago, when 
he says that "amongst themselves they agree well and 




A CORNISH STILE 



company lovingly together." I recall, too, that some 
social rodents, that live in communities, in collections 
of burrows or villages, have a track of that kind lead- 
ing from village to village, worn by the feet of the 
little animals in visiting their neighbours. The fields 
being small you have innumerable stiles to cross in a 
five or a ten miles walk ; but they do not want climb- 



CORNWALL'S CONNEMARA 33 

ing, as they are very nearly all of that Cornish type 
made with half a dozen or more large slabs of granite 
placed gridiron-wise almost flush with the ground. 
You step easily over the stones : but the cattle do not 
follow, since, owing to their inability to see just where 
their feet will be set, their legs would come down 
between the slabs. 

Cows are in most of the fields, the dairy being the 
main thing in these farms ; and next to the small 
Jersey-like cow, the native breed, the pig ranks in im- 
portance. It is pleasant to see the pigs in these parts, 
as they are allowed more liberty in the fields and about 
the house than they usually get in other places ; or, 
indeed, anywhere on this side of St. George's Channel. 
If not " the gintleman that pays the rint," the pig con- 
tributes a good deal towards it, and short of liberty to 
walk in at the front door and take his place in the 
family circle he has every consideration paid him. On 
going up to a farm-house one is sometimes obliged to 
get round or step over a pig lying comfortably in the 
path. One day, going to call on some friends who 
had taken lodgings at a small farm, I found a portly 
sow lying in the way a dozen yards or so from the 
front door. My friends were getting ready for a 
walk, and when we came out the sow got up and, 
placing herself at the side of the lady, set out with 
us. We all tried our best to turn her back, shouting 
indignantly at her and pushing her away with our 
sticks and boots, but all in vain — she would come. 
" I'm to blame," said the lady. " When we first came 
we had tea out of doors, and when this pig came up 

D 



34 THE LAND'S END 

to look at us I foolishly gave her a slice of bread and 
butter and spoke kindly to her, and now 1 can't get 
away from her. I give her nothing, and 1 try to 
escape her attention, but she watches the door, and 
when she sees me with my things on she insists on 
keeping with me even if I walk miles. It is most 
inconvenient." It certainly was, and we carefully 
avoided the village for fear of remarks. Fowls, too, 
are reared in numbers, and it is a great grievance of 
the farmers that foxes must be religiously preserved 
along this coast where they cannot be hunted. Here, 
again, I am reminded of Carew's Survey of Cornwall, 
in which he writes : " The fox planteth his dwelling 
in the steep cliffs of the seaside, where he possesseth 
holds, so many in number, so dangerous of access, 
and so full of windings, as in a manner it falleth out 
a matter impossible to disseize him of his ancient 
inheritance." He still keeps it, and after three cen- 
turies is more secure in it than ever, since there is 
now no stronger law than this unwritten one which 
gives immunity to the fox. 

As a rule, several dogs are kept on the farm ; but 
he cares little for them. His fastness is close by in 
the cliffs, and between it and the farm there is a 
wilderness of furze bushes and stone fences, the ins 
and outs of which he knows better than the dogs. 
They cannot come near him. At one place the 
farmer's wife told me the foxes came about the house 
almost every night and started barking, whereupon 
the dogs barked in reply, and this would go on, bark 
fox, bark dog, by the hour, keeping them awake, 



CORNWALL'S CONNEMARA 35 

until at last the dogs, tired of the useless contest, 
would go to sleep ; then the foxes would sneak in to 
see what they could pick up. 

There is very little cultivation — hardly more than 
is required for the use of the farm, and in many fields 
even this little is carried on under difficulties on 
account of the stones. The stones are taken out and 
piled on to the walls or hedges at the side, and 
though this process has been going on for centuries 
many boulders and huge blocks of granite still remain 
in the little fields. I was amused one day at the sight 
of a field of only about two acres on which I counted 
135 stones appearing like huge mushrooms and toad- 
stools over the ground. Corn had been grown on it, 
and I asked the farmer how it was managed. He 
answered that he would laugh to see a man and 
horses from any other part of the country try to 
cultivate that field and others like it. Here the 
men are used to it, and horses know their part 
so well that if the share touches a stone they stop 
instantly and wait for the ploughman's word to 
move on. 

This same farmer told me that one day last 
summer a lady visitor staying in the neighbourhood 
came to where he was doing some work and burst out 
in praise of the place, and told him she envied him 
his home in the dearest, sweetest, loveliest spot on 
earth. "That's what you think, ma'am," he returned, 
" because you're here for a week or two in summer 
when it's fine and the heath in bloom. Now I think 
it's the poorest, ugliest, horriblest place in the whole 



36 THE LAND'S END 

world, because I've got to live in it and get my living 
out of it." 

They certainly have to work hard to make the -£l 
per acre they have to pay for their stony fields. But 
they are a tough, industrious, frugal people, in many 
instances little removed from peasants in their way of 
living, and are strongly attached to their rude homes 
and rough country. If you tell them that their lot is 
exceedingly hard, that they pay too high a rent, and 
so on, enumerating all the drawbacks, they assent 
eagerly, and will put in many little touches to make 
the picture darker ; but if you then advise them to 
throw up their farms and migrate to some place you 
can name, in the Midlands say, where they will pay 
less for better land, and be out of the everlasting 
wind which tears every green leaf to shreds and 
makes their lives a perpetual discomfort, they shake 
their heads. They cannot endure the thought of 
leaving their homes. It is only the all but complete 
ruin of the tin-mining industry that has sent so many 
Cornishmen into exile in distant lands. But these 
wanderers are always thinking of home and come 
back when they can. One meets them every day, 
young and middle aged men, back from Africa, 
Australia, America ; not to settle down, since there is 
nothing for them to do — not just yet at all events ; 
but because they have saved a little and can afford to 
take that long journey for the joy of seeing the dear 
old faces again, and the dear familiar land which 
proved so uninteresting to the reverend author of 
Forest Scenery . 



CORNWALL'S CONNEMARA 37 

But farming, unlike the mining and fishing indus- 
tries, cannot fail utterly, and so long as a living can 
be made out of it these men will stick to their 
farms. 

One brilliant spring-like day in midwinter I came 
upon an old man on the footpath at some distance 
from the nearest house, painfully walking to and 
fro on a clean piece of ground with the aid of 
two sticks. An old farmer, past work, I thought. 
His appearance greatly attracted me, for though his 
bent shrunken legs could hardly support him, he had 
a fine head and a broad, deep, powerful-looking 
chest. His face was of that intensely Irish type so 
common in West Cornwall, but more shapely, more 
noble, with a look of strength and resolution not at 
all common. 

Seeing that he was old I supposed he was deaf, 
and shouted my " Good day," and the remark that it 
was a very fine day. But there was no need to shout, 
his senses were very good. "Good day to you," he 
returned, his stone-grey stern eyes fixed on my face. 
" Yes, it is a fine day indeed — very, very fine. And 
no frost, no cold at all, and the winter going on, going 
on. We are getting on very well indeed." And to 
this subject he kept in spite of my attempts to lead 
the talk to something else. The lovely weather, the 
extraordinary mildness of the season, the comfort of 
a winter with no frost or cold at all — to that he would 
come back. And at length, when I said good-bye 
and left him, the last words I heard him say were, 
"Yes, the winter is going— very freely, very freely." 



38 THE LAND'S END 

For he was old — his age was eighty-seven ; he had 
come to that time of life when the weather becomes 
strangely important to a man, when winter is a season 
of apprehension ; when he remembers that the days 
of our age are three-score years and ten, and though 
men be so strong that they come to four-score years, 
yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow, so 
soon passeth it away. I was told that he had farmed 
the land where I found him taking his constitutional 
since he was a young man ; that some months ago, 
on account of his infirmities, he had handed the farm 
over to one of his sons, and that he was still able to 
help a little in the work. His arms were strong still, 
and once up on the seat he could drive a cart or trap 
or reaping machine as well as any one. 

He was but one of several grey old men I met with 
on the farms, and it seemed to me that they were some- 
thing like their neighbour the badger, that they are as 
tenacious of their dreary-looking little homesteads 
and stony fields as that tough beast is of his earth 
among the rocks. 




CHAPTER IV 



OLD CORNISH HEDGES 



Hedges in England — Plant and animal life — Stone hedges in Corn- 
wall — Effect of wind on trees — How hedges are made — Appear- 
ance of stone hedges — An ancient hedge — Woody ivy — Signs of 
antiquity — An old man's testimony. 

EVERY one in England knows what a hedge 
is — a row of thorn or other hardy bushes 
originally planted to protect a field, which, 
when old and unkept, has the appearance and 
character of a brake or thicket. It consequently 
comes as a surprise when we first visit the remote and 
most un-English county of Cornwall to discover that 
a hedge there may mean something quite different. It 
puzzled me to read in a book on Cornwall that in 
some exceedingly rough places near the coast one 
found it easier to make one's way over the ground by 
climbing on to a hedge and walking along its top. 

39 



4 o THE LAND'S END 

The oldest, toughest, closest and most evenly-cut 
hedge one knows would hardly afford a safe footing 
for a man ; and as to attempting to get upon or walk 
on a big unkept hedge, such as are common in the 
south and west counties on this side the Tamar, the 
very thought of it is painful. In imagination one 
sees, and seeing feels, oneself stuck fast in a big 
bramble bush. In Cornwall I discovered that a stone 
wall was called a hedge — the sort of wall which in 
Scotland I had been taught to call a dyke. I did not 
like it so well as the English hedge, that wild dis- 
ordered tangle of all the most beautiful plants in 
these islands — black and white thorn ; privet with its 
small grape-like clusters ; yew and holly and ivy with 
late, honeyed blossoms for bees and wasps and hor- 
nets ; and briar and sweet-briar, bramble and briony ; 
also poisonous black briony and traveller's-joy, a 
green and silver tapestry ; and wayfaring tree, spindle- 
wood and cornel, with scarlet, purple and orange- 
coloured berries ; and dark deadly-nightshade, push- 
ing its slender stems up through the interlaced 
branches — all massed together for common protection 
like a packed herd of wild swine on their defence in 
some savage solitude, displaying bristling backs and 
bared gnashing tushes to a hostile world. 

They are — these wildings of the hedge — the counter- 
parts in the vegetable world of the creatures called 
"vermin "in the animal kingdom. In the recesses 
of their thorny intertwining boughs, and deep down 
among their tough ancient roots, the vermin, the 
banned ones, have their home and refuge — the quaint 



OLD CORNISH HEDGES 41 

hedgehog and minute long-nosed shrew ; black and 
white magpie and chacking, tail-shaking butcher-bird ; 
adder and snake and slow-worm ; blood-sucking stoat 
and weasel with flat heads and serpentine bodies, and 
their small quarry, rats and voles and pretty sharp- 
nosed wood-mice with leaf-like ear, and winter sleep- 
ing dormice. 

It was fortunate that in the long ago, when our 
progenitors began to take plots of ground for culti- 
vation and pasture, they found out this cheap 
ready way of marking their boundaries and safe- 
guarding their cattle and corn. We may say they 
planted better than they knew : they planted once, 
and many and many a hedge — unnumbered miles and 
leagues of hedges — that are now great belts of thicket, 
were first planted by man in the remote past. Nature 
took over the thin row of thorn seedlings and made 
it what it is, not only the useful thing it was intended 
for — a natural barbed-wire entanglement — but a thing 
of beauty and a joy for ever. 

In West Cornwall, where I first came to know the 
native hedge, they cannot have these belts of thicket, 
rich in a varied plant and animal life. It is a country 
of moors and rugged stony hills where nothing 
flourishes but heath and furze and bracken. The 
farming folk have succeeded in long time in creating 
small arable and grass fields in the midst of this 
desolation, but they cannot grow trees on account 
of the violent winds charged with salt moisture that 
blow incessantly from the Atlantic. If the farmer 
plants a few trees so that he may one day eat an 



42 THE LAND'S END 

apple of his own growing and sit in the shade, he 
must build a wall eight or ten feet high to protect 
them from the salt blast, and he may then die of old 
age before the apple is ripe or the shade created. 
Nor can he grow a hedge : the furze, it is true, 
abounds everywhere, but it is a most intractable plant 
that will go (or grow) its own wild way, and no man 
has yet subdued it to his will and made it serve as a 
hedge. Yet even in this wind-vexed land a few self- 
planted trees may be seen. 

You find them in the strip of farm country between 
the hills and sea, in hollows and under high banks, or 
where a mass of rock affords them shelter ; and they 
are mostly hawthorns and blackthorns with a few 
hardy bush-like trees of other kinds. They are like 
the trees and bushes on the most exposed coasts in 
Yorkshire and in other places, growing all one way, 
lying close to and sometimes actually on the ground, 
stretching out their branches and every twig towards 
the inland country. The sight of these wind- 
tormented, one-sided trees fascinates me and I stay 

long to look at them. 

A bristled tree 
With branches cedared by the salten gale, 

Stretched back, as if with wings that cannot flee, 

is how Gordon Hake describes the appearance, seeing, 
as I do, the desire and struggle to escape — to fly from 
that pitiless persecution. But the " wings " I do not 
see : in summer the foliage is to my sight but a ragged 
mantle ; in winter the human expression is strongest 
and most pathetic. Held by the feet in the grip of 



OLD CORNISH HEDGES 43 

earth, the beaten bush strains to get away; it suggests 
the figure of a person crawling, or trying to crawl, the 
knee-like joints on the ground, the body-like trunk 
thrown forward, the long bare branches and terminal 
twigs, like the brown, thin naked arms and claw-like 
opened fingers of a starving scourged slave in the 
tropics, extended imploringly towards the land. 

This being the nature of the country the farmer can 
but hedge his land and fields with stone : he is in a 
measure compelled to do so, since the earth is full of 
it and the land strewn with boulders ; to make a field 
he must remove it and bestow it somewhere. Now 
after centuries of this process of removing and piling 
up stones, the farm land has become covered over with 
a network of these enduring hedges, or fences, inter- 
secting each other at all angles ; and viewed from a 
hill-top the country has the appearance of a patched 
quilt made of pieces of all sizes and every possible 
shape, and of all shades of green from darkest gorse 
to the delicate and vivid greens of the young winter 
grass. 

That half-reclaimed district, especially the strip of 
coast from St. Ives Bay to Cape Cornwall, was a good 
winter hunting ground, and I spent many weeks in 
ranging about the fields and waste or incult places 
among them. Here you can wander at will, without 
fear of hurting the farmer's feelings, as in Devonshire, 
by walking on his land. The cultivation is little, the 
fields being mostly grass : the small farm-house is out 
of sight somewhere behind the stone hedges ; it is 
rare to meet with a human being, and the few cows or 



44 THE LAND'S END 

calves you occasionally come across follow you about 
as if only too pleased to have a visitor. Climbing 
over the next hedge into the next field you find 
nobody there but a pig who stares at you, then wel- 
comes you with a good-humoured grunt ; or an old 
solitary plough-horse ; or no semi-human domestic 
creature at all, only a crowd of busy starlings ; or 
starlings mixed with daws, field-fares, missel-thrushes 
and a few wagtails ; or a couple of magpies, or a 
small flock of wintering curlews to be found day after 
day on the same spot. After crossing two or three 
such fields you come upon an unreclaimed patch, or 
belt, where grey-lichened rocks are mixed with masses 
of old furze bushes, and heath and tussocks of pale 
brome-grass. A lonely, silent, peaceful place, where, 
albeit a habitation of man for untold centuries, it is 
wild Nature still. 

Here, with eyes and mind occupied with the bird, 
I did not at first pay much attention to the hedges : I 
simply got over them, or, in thorny and boggy places, 
walked on them, but eventually they began to exercise 
an attraction, and I began to recognise that these, too, 
like the planted hedges of other districts, were man's 
creation but in part, since Nature had added much 
to make them what they are. Human hands first 
raised them : the process is going on all the time ; 
the labourer, the cow-boy, the farmer himself, when 
there is nothing else to do, goes out and piles up 
stones to stop a gap the cattle have made, to add to 
the height or length of an old hedge, and so on, but 
the wall once made is taken over by Nature as in the 



OLD CORNISH HEDGES . 45 

case of the planted hedge. She softens and darkens 
the crude harsh surface, clothes it in grey and yellow 
lichens and cushioned green moss, and decorates it 
with everything that will grow on it, before the time 
comes for her to ruin and finally to obliterate. But 
what time is needed here for demolition with such a 
material as granite to work on, where there are no 
trees to insinuate their roots into the crevices, slowly 
to expand the pliant fibres into huge woody wedges to 
thrust the loose stones apart and finally to pull them 
down ! We can imagine how slow the destructive 
processes are when we look at innumerable Cornish 
crosses scattered over the county, showing clearly the 
lines cut on them in the early days of Christianity in 
this district. Still more do we see it in the ancient 
sacred stones — the cromlechs, coits, hurlers and holed 
stones, moor-stones or " merry maidens," and many 
others — which have stood and resisted the disintegrat- 
ing effect of the weather since prehistoric times. The 
wall built is practically everlasting, but Nature works 
slowly on it, and the hedges I had about me differed 
greatly on this account, from the rude walls raised 
but yesterday or a dozen or twenty years ago to those 
which must have stood for centuries or for a thousand 
years or longer. Indeed, it was the appearance of 
extreme antiquity in one of these hedges, which I 
often crossed and sometimes walked on, which first 
excited my interest in the subject. It looked, and 
probably is, older than the walls of Silchester, which 
date back 1700 or 1800 years, and are now being 
gradually pulled down by the trees that have grown 



46 THE LAND'S END 

upon them. It was the longest of the old hedges 1 
found, beginning among the masses of granite on the 
edge of the cliff, and winding away inland to lose 
itself eventually among the rocks and gullies and 
furze-thickets at the foot of a great boulder-strewn 
hill. Its sinuosity struck me as a mark of extreme 
age, as in this it resembled the huge prehistoric walls 
or earthworks made of chalk on the downs in 
Southern England, which meander in an extraordinary 
way. It was also larger than the other hedges, which 
crossed its winding course at all angles, being in most 
parts six to seven feet high, and exceedingly broad ; 
moreover, where the stones could be seen they ap- 
peared to be more closely fitted together than in other 
hedges. Most of the stonework was, however, pretty 
well covered over, in some places with a very thick 
turf, in others by furze and bracken, rooted in the 
crevices and in places hiding the wall in a dense 
thicket. 

But of all the plants growing on it the ivy was most 
remarkable. It is not a plant that flourishes in this 
district, where it has as hard a struggle as any tree to 
maintain its existence. It is found only in sheltered 
situations on this coast, in the villages, and on the 
landward side of steep banks and large masses of rock. 
On this old wall there was really no shelter, since the 
furious blasts from the sea swept both sides of it with 
the same violence. Yet in places the ivy had got pos- 
session of it, but it was an ivy very much altered in 
character by the unfavourable conditions from that 
greenest luxuriant plant we know so well. In place of 



OLD CORNISH HEDGES 47 

the dark mass of foliage, the leaves were few and small 
and far apart, so that viewing the wall from a little 
distance away you would not notice that it had any 
ivy growing on it, but would see that the more naked 
portions were covered with a growth of rope-like 
stems. The wonder is that with so few leaves it 
can grow so much wood ! The stems, which are 




HEDGE AT ST. IVES 

not thick, are smooth and of a pale grey colour and 
grow in and out of the crevices, and cross and re- 
cross one another, fitting into all the inequalities of 
the stony surface and in places where they cover the 
wall looking like a numerous brood or tangle of grey 
serpents. 

This snaky appearance of the almost leafless old 
wall-ivy fascinated me, and I went often to look at it 
on the same spot and was never tired of the sight. 



48 THE LAND'S END 

It struck me as curious that the woody ivy should 
have this aspect, since the wall itself in some parts 
distinctly suggested the serpentine form and appear- 
ance. Here again I was reminded of some of the 
long earthworks or walls on the Wiltshire and Dorset- 
shire downs — the rounded, thickly turfed bank which 
winds serpent-like over the hills and across the valleys, 
and which often has a green colour differing slightly 
from that of the earth it lies across. 

The old Cornish hedge had this aspect in places 
where it was clothed with turf, and, viewed from a 
distance and seen winding about in great curves 
across the rough brown heath and furze-grown earth, 
the serpentine appearance was very marked. 

Whether or not the Cornish antiquaries have paid 
any attention to these ancient hedges I do not know. 
The only native I came across who had anything to say 
about them was a peasant farmer whose acquaintance 
1 made at his cottage-like farm, a few miles from the 
hedge I have described. He was a man of seventy- 
nine but vigorous still and of a lively mind. When 
I spoke to him about the old hedge and its ancient 
appearance, he said he had known it all his life ; that 
he was a native of a small hamlet close to the hedge, 
and at the age of seven, when he first took to birds'- 
nesting, he used to hunt along it on every summer 
day and came to know it as well as he knew the fence 
round his garden and the walls of the cottage he lived 
in. It had not, he assured me, changed in the least 
during the last seventy or seventy-two years : it was 
to-day exactly what it was in his early boyhood, with 



OLD CORNISH HEDGES 49 

thick turf and furze and bracken and woody ivy 
covering it in the same way in the same old places. 
This made him think it must be very, very old. 

It seemed to me that his life, although a long one, 
was but a short period to measure by in such a case, 
that if he could have consulted his father and grand- 
father and his remoter ancestors back to the time 
when the last Cornish king was cast out by William 
the Bastard, they would all have given the same 
testimony and said that the hedge was very old when 
they knew it. 




CHAPTER V 

BOLERIUM: THE END OF ALL 
THE LAND 

Cliff scenery and headlands — The Land's End sentiment — Pilgrims 
and how they are affected — Wilkie Collins — The child's vision — 
Books on Cornwall — <A Trip to the Far West — Sir Humphry 
Davy — Wesley — Winter nights at the Land's End — Lighthouses 
— Associations and speculations — The scene of great tragedies in 
the past. 

EVERY day, even in winter, if the weather be 
not too bad, but chiefly during the nine months 
from March to November, pilgrims come to 
this wind-swept, wave-beaten point to gaze and set 
their feet upon the little rocky promontory of the 
Land's End. It is less bold and impressive than 
many others of the hundred headlands at this western 
extremity of England between St. Ives and Mount's 
Bay. From this or that projecting point, command- 

5° 



THE END OF ALL THE LAND 51 

ing a view ot the coastline for some distance, one 
may count a dozen or more of these headlands thrust 
out aslant like stupendous half-ruined buttresses sup- 
porting the granite walls of the cliff. They are of a 
sullen brown colour and rough harsh aspect, and in 
places have the appearance of being built up of huge 
square blocks of granite, and at other points they 
form stacks of columns as at the Giant's Causeway. 
The summits of these headlands are often high, 
resembling ruinous castles placed on projecting points 
of the cliff; they are confused masses of rocks of 
many shapes, piled loosely one upon the other, their 
exposed surfaces clothed over with long coarse grey 
lichen. Large gulls, daws and cormorants sit or 
stand here and there on the ledges and prominent 
points, the herring gulls clamorous at the sight of a 
human form ; the restive daws quitting their stands 
to wheel about at intervals, rising and falling, soon to 
settle down again ; the cormorants silent and motion- 
less, standing erect with curved, snaky necks, like 
birds carved in ebony. 

Stealing quietly among these hoary masses of rock 
you may see a very wild rabbit, and on a bright, still, 
winter day, if you are singularly fortunate, you may 
catch sight of a beast better worth seeing, a cliff fox, 
lying fast asleep or lightly dozing, stretched at full 
length on a ledge, looking intensely red in the sun- 
shine, and very conspicuous against the hoary lichened 
rock. This is his home and castle, which he shares 
with the rabbits that know his ways, and the birds 
that are always just out of his reach. Thus do they 



52 THE LANDS END 

live together in one house like one antagonistic family 
in a strange artificial harmony, and do not mix, but 
come and go and move about freely, and bask in the 
warm sunshine, and sit up to rub their long ears and 
whiskers, and spread out their wings to dry, and preen 
their feathers. Peace and quiet in their castle, while 
the great waves roll in to beat on its caverned walls 
beneath, making the earth tremble with their measured 
blows, covering the black rocks with dazzling white 
foam, and sending up a mist of spray to the summit. 

At intervals between Bay and Bay, a distance of 
thirty miles, you come upon headlands of this type — 
Cape Cornwall, Gurnard's Head, Zennor Cliffs and 
others, to the north of Land's End, while just south 
of it you have the noblest rock scenery of this coast, 
including the stupendous cliffs of Tol-Pedn-Penwith 
and Treryn Dinas, with its famed Logan Stone. 
Bolerium itself, the narrow promontory of piled 
rocks of the Land's End and the flat bit of country 
adjoining it is, sentiment apart, one of the least in- 
teresting points on the coast. 

But the sentiment is a very great thing and in- 
teresting to observe. And this is easy, since the 
pilgrims mostly come by way of Penzance, distant 
about a dozen miles, travelling in batches of twenty- 
five or thirty or more, packed closely in some public 
conveyance ; so that one has but to join the crowd 
and, sitting among them, watch their faces out of the 
corners of his eyes. They are a mixed company of 
men and women of all conditions, from all parts of 
the country, with some Americans and Colonials. It 



THE END OF ALL THE LAND 



53 



is indeed curious to see an identical feeling on faces 
so unlike, from the very young who do not try to 
conceal it, to the very aged and almost worn-out globe 
wanderers, who are now nearly at the end of their 




NEAR LANDS END 



life's pilgrimage, and have seen pretty well all that 
was worth seeing on this wide earth except this one 
famous spot which by chance has been left to the 
last. And by and by, after travelling half a dozen 
miles, they find themselves in a land unlike any place 



54 THE LAND'S END 

they know ; inhabited, for there are a few small sad- 
looking granite cottages and farms and hamlets, but 
of a rude and desolate aspect, and therefore in har- 
mony with their emotions and preconceived ideas 
about the place. It is a treeless barren country, hill 
and moor, with furze and brown heath interspersed 
with grey boulder stones, the whole dominated by 
the great desolate hill of Chapel Cam Brea. The 
travellers look out, straining their eyes to see the 
end ; but before that comes the hilly country is left 
behind, and at the last it is flat and tame with a sad- 
looking granite-built village and the grey sea beyond. 
One has watched the bright eager look that expected 
so much fade out of the various faces ; and by the 
time the pilgrims get down to scatter along the cliff 
or to go at once to their luncheon at the hotel it is 
pretty well all gone. And if you go back to Penzance 
to join the next lot, and then again, and every day for 
a week or a month, you will witness the same thing — 
the collection of unlike faces with the light of the 
same feeling in the eyes of all, increasing as they 
advance over that rude moorland country and fading 
out at the end to that blank look — " Is this the Land's 
End — is this all ! " 

What, then, did they expect ? Wilkie Collins best 
answers that question in his pleasant book of rambles 
written more than half a century ago, when he says 
that the Land's End is to Cornwall what Jerusalem is 
to the Holy Land, the great and final object of a 
journey to the westernmost county of England, its 
Ultima Thule, where it ceases ; a name that strikes 



THE END OF ALL THE LAND SS 

us most in childhood when we learnt our geography ; 
which fills the minds of imaginative people with 
visions of barrenness and solitude and dreams of 
some lonely promontory, the place . where the last 
man in England will be found waiting for death at 
the end of the world. 

That is indeed the secret of the visitor's expectant 
feeling and disappointment — the vague vision of a 
vastness and grandeur and desolateness almost preter- 
natural, conceived in childhood, which all the ex- 
perience of a long life of disillusionment has been 
powerless to eradicate from the mind, or to replace 
with a mental picture more in accord with the reality. 

But if this disillusionment is plainly visible to an 
observer on the faces of many visitors, the books 
about Cornwall tell a different story ; their writers 
would have us believe that the reality has surpassed 
their expectations, that their emotions of admiration 
and astonishment have been deeply moved. When I 
had been some time in Cornwall and it had taken hold 
of me, I sat myself down before a formidable array 
of books descriptive of the duchy, only to find that 
reading them was an exceedingly wearisome task. By 
and by I discovered something to entertain and keep 
me going ; this was the grand business of describing 
the Land's End in a suitable manner, but more or less 
rhetorically and charged with exalted feeling, which 
was undertaken in turn by every visitor. This made 
many a dull book amusing. I experienced a kind of 
sporting interest in the literary traveller's progress 
through the county, and looked eagerly forward to 



56 THE LAND'S END 

his arrival at the famous spot where he would have 
to pull himself together and launch himself bird-like 
from the cliffs, as it were, on the void sublime. There 
was great variety in these utterances, but I think 
the one that diverted me most was in a book entitled 
A Trip to the Far JVest y published in 1840, as the 
author, one Baker Peter Smith, was evidently an 
experimenter in words, some of his own making ; 
or we might call him an Early Victorian young man 
in search of a style. 

" I reached the Land's End," he wrote, " and sat 
down on a protuberant block of granite, close to the 
precipice, overhanging the multitangular rocks which 
form an impenetrable barrier against the raging tides 
of the mighty waters." After lamenting that he had 
so little time in which to survey the " multicapsular 
curiosities of the region," he proceeds : " The local 
sublimity of the Land's End affords a commanding 
view of scenick expanse ; and the colossal columns of 
rock give an awful effect to the stupendous vision ; 
whilst, added to these grave and elevating sentiments, 
consequent on so grand a sight, the sense of hearing 
also acts upon the mind : by the distant roar of the 
angry sea, ascending from the caverns below, and the 
screaming of the Cornish chough assailing you from 
above and every side," and so on. He concludes : — 
" The entranced spectator has no election, but is 
engrossed with admiration of that Great Power by 
the fiat of whose mere volition nature's chaos was 
thus harmonized and stamped with the glorifying im- 
press of multiplicious beauty." 



THE END OF ALL THE LAND 57 

One is glad that cormorant, book-devouring Time, 
has spared us Baker Peter Smith. 

But there are a few noble passages to be found as 
well, and I think this one of Humphry Davy, writ- 
ten in youth before the flower of poesy withered in 

him, pleases me the best : — 

On the sea 
The sunbeams tremble and the purple light 
Illumes the dark Bolerium, seat of storms ! 
Dear are his granite wilds, his schistine rocks 
Encircled by the waves, where to the gale 
The haggard cormorant shrieks, and, far beyond 
Where the great ocean mingles with the sky, 
Behold the cloud-like islands, grey in mist. 

Another notable utterance was that of John 
Wesley, when on a Sunday in September, 1743, 
after preaching to the people at Sennen, he went down 
to look at the Land's End. " It was an awful sight," 
he wrote. " But how will this melt away when God 
ariseth in judgment ! The sea beneath doth indeed 
boil like a pot. One would think the deep to be 
hoary. But though they swell yet can they not 
prevail. He shall set their bounds which they cannot 
pass." 

There spoke the founder of Methodism, saturated 
in Biblical phraseology until it gushed spontaneously 
from him even as its song or cry from a bird. He 
had forgotten his own language, as it were, and even 
in an exalted moment in this grey north land could 
only express himself in these old Asiatic figures of 
speech. 

To return from this digression. Although the 



58 THE LAND'S END 

vague image of an imagined Land's End fades from 
the mind and is perhaps lost when the reality is 
known, the ancient associations of the place remain, 
and, if a visit be rightly timed, they may invest it 
with a sublimity and fascination not its own. I 
loitered many days near that spot in midwinter, in 
the worst possible weather, but even when pining for 
a change to blue skies and genial sunshine I blessed 
the daily furious winds which served to keep the 
pilgrims away, and to half blot out the vulgar modern 
buildings with rain and mist from the Atlantic. At 
dark I would fight my way against the wind to the 
cliff, and down by the sloping narrow neck of land to 
the masses of loosely piled rocks at its extremity. It 
was a very solitary place at that hour, where one 
feared not to be intruded on by any other night- 
wanderer in human shape. The raving of the wind 
among the rocks ; the dark ocean — exceedingly dark 
except when the flying clouds were broken and the 
stars shining in the clear spaces touched the big black 
incoming waves with a steely grey light ; the jagged 
isolated rocks, on which so many ships have been 
shattered, rising in awful blackness from the spectral 
foam that appeared and vanished and appeared again ; 
the multitudinous hoarse sounds of the sea, with 
throbbing and hollow booming noises in the caverns 
beneath — all together served to bring back something 
of the old vanished picture or vision of Bolerium 
as we first imagine it. The glare from the vari- 
ous lighthouses visible at this point only served 
to heighten the inexpressibly sombre effect, since 




LAND'S END 



To face page 5S 



THE END OF ALL THE LAND 59 

shining from a distance they made the gloomy world 
appear vaster. Down in the south, twenty-five miles 
away, the low clouds were lit up at short intervals by 
wide white flashes as of sheet lightning from the 
Lizard lights, the most powerful of all lights, the re- 
flection of which may be seen at a distance of sixty or 
seventy miles at sea. In front of the Land's End 
promontory, within five miles of it, was the angry red 
glare from the Longships tower, and further away to 
the left the white revolving light of the Wolf light- 
house. 

It was perhaps on some tempestuous winter night 
at the Land's End that the fancy, told as a legend or 
superstitious belief in J. H. Pearce's Cornish Drolls , 
occurred to him or to some one, that the Wolf Rock 
was the habitation of a great black dog, a terrible 
supernatural beast that preys on the souls of the 
dead. For the rock lies directly in the route of 
those who die on the mainland and journey over the 
sea to their ultimate abode, the Scilly Isles : and when 
the wind blows hard against them and they are beaten 
down like migrating birds and fly close to the sur- 
face, he is able as they come over the rock to capture 
and devour them. 

During these vigils, when I was in a sense the 
"last man " in that most solitary place, its associations, 
historical and mythical, exercised a strange power 
over me. Here, because of its isolation, or remote- 
ness, from Saxon England, because it is the very end 
of the land, " the westeste point of the land of 
Cornewalle," the ancient wild spirit of the people 



60 THE LAND'S END 

remained longest unchanged, and retained much of 
its distinctive character down to within recent times. 
It was a Celtic people with an Iberian strain, even as 
in Wales and Ireland and Scotland. Now, either 
because of a different proportion of the dark aborigi- 
nal blood, or of the infusion of Scandinavian and 
other racial elements, or some other cause, these four 
Celtic families differ very widely, as we know ; but 
we think, or at all events are accustomed to say, that 
they are an imaginative, a poetic people. Doubtless 
in Cornwall this spirit was always weakest, since it 
never succeeded in expressing itself in any permanent 
form ; but albeit feeble it probably did exist, and in 
this very district, this end of all the land, it must 
have lingered longest. If this be so it is strange 
to think that it was perhaps finally extinguished by 
the Wesley brothers — one with the poetry of the 
Hebrews ever on his lips, the other with his own 
lyrical gift ! 

It may be said that in the middle of the eighteenth 
century the light must have been so feeble that it 
would have soon expired of itself if Methodism had 
not trampled out the last faint sparks ; and it may 
also be said that the Cornish people did not lose 
much, seeing that this root had never flowered ; that 
they had never sung and never said anything worth 
remembering ; while on the other hand their gain 
was a substantial one, for though it imposed an ugly 
form of religion and ugly houses of worship, it 
changed them (so the Methodists say) from brutality 
and vice to what they are — a temperate, law-abiding 



THE END OF ALL THE LAND 61 

people. But 1 shall have something more to say on 
this subject in a later chapter. 

Here among the rocks by night I think less of 
these moral changes, and of other events within 
historical times, than of those which came before, of 
which we have no certain knowledge. We can only 
assume that in the successive invasions during the 
Bronze Age this was invariably the last place con- 
quered and last refuge of a beaten fugitive people. 

I recall here a strange phenomenon in wild-bird 
life occasionally witnessed in this district. Cornwall 
has a singularly mild and equable climate, but great 
frosts do at long intervals invade it and reach to the 
very extremity of the land : and when a cold wave, 
like that of the winter of 1906-7, travels west, the 
birds flying for life before it advance along the 
Cornish country until they come to a point beyond 
which they cannot go, for the affrighting ocean is 
before them and they are spent with hunger and cold. 
They come in a continuous stream, to congregate in 
tens of thousands, covering the cliffs and fields and 
stone hedges ; and the villagers turn out with guns 
and nets and sticks and stones to get their fill of 
killing. 

So in the dreadful past, whenever a wave of Celtic 
conquest swept west, the unhappy people were driven 
further and further from the Tamar along that tongue 
of land, their last refuge, but where there were no 
rivers and mountains to stay the pursuers, nor forests 
and marshes in which to hide, until they could go no 
further, for the salt sea was in front of them. They 



62 THE LAND'S END 

too, like the frost-afflicted birds, gathered in thousands 
and sat crowded in every headland and promontory 
and every stony hill summit, ever turning their worn 
dusty faces and glazed eyes to the east to watch for 
the coming of the foe — the strong, fiendish, broad- 
faced, blue-eyed men with metal weapons in their 
hands, spear and sword and battle-axe. 

These are the people 1 think about on dark tem- 
pestuous evenings in this solitary place ; Bolerium is 
haunted by the vast ghostly multitude. 




CHAPTER VI 



CASTLES BY THE SEA 



The rocky forelands — Delightful days — Colour of the sea — Wild-bird 
life — Montgomery's Pelican Island — Gulls and daws — We envy 
birds their wings — The sense of sublimity — Cormorants — Ravens 
and superstition — Gurnard's Head — A first visit — A siesta in a 
dangerous place — The hunter's vision. 

IF " dark Bolerium " seemed best on tempestuous 
midwinter evenings because of the spirit of the 
place, the sentiment, it was not so with the 
numerous other forelands along this rude coast. I 
haunted them by day, and the finer the weather the 
better I liked them. It is true that they too have 
dark associations from which one cannot wholly 
escape. The huge masses of rock rising high above 
the cliff on many of these promontories have the 

63 



64 THE LAND'S END 

appearance of gigantic castles by the sea, and that 
they served as castles to the ancient inhabitants of 
the land we know, as in many instances the primitive 
earthworks, the trench and embankment raised to cut 
them off from the land, remain to this day. But 
the thought of the " dreadful past " is not so in- 
sistent in these castles, which were my houses by 
the sea, as at the Land's End promontory, and 
would almost vanish in the brilliant sunshine and 
in view of the wide expanse of ocean flecked with 
dazzling foam. 

I could hardly imagine a higher pleasure than was 
mine on many a bright day in winter and spring, 
when I had the whole coast pretty well to myself and 
spent long hours in rambling from point to point 
and in gazing out on the sea from my seat on 
some rocky pile that crowned one of the bolder 
headlands. 

I had heard a good deal about the beautiful colour 
of the sea in these parts, yet was often surprised at 
the sight of it. I had seen no such blues and greens 
on any other part of the British coast ; and no such 
purples in the shallower waters within the caves and 
near the cliffs where the rocks beneath were over- 
grown with seaweed. Where these great purple 
patches appeared on the pure brilliant green it was 
veritably a c< wine-purple sea " and looked as if hun- 
dreds of hogsheads of claret or Burgundy had been 
emptied into it. 

But the sea and its colour and the joy of a vast 
expanse would not have drawn me so often to the 



CASTLES BY THE SEA 6s 

castled forelands nor held me so long but for the 
birds that haunted them, seeing that this visible world 
is to me but a sad and empty place without wonder- 
ful life and the varied forms of life, which are in har- 
mony with it, and give it a meaning, and a grace and 
beauty and splendour not its own. If there be no 
visible wild life, then I am like that wandering being 
or spirit in Montgomery's Pelican Island, who was 
alone on the earth before life was, and had no know- 
ledge or intimation of any intelligence but its own ; 
who roamed over the seas that tumbled round the 
globe for thousands and thousands of years, flying 
ever from its own loneliness and vainly seeking 
comfort and happiness in loving and being the 
companion of wind and cloud and wave, and day 
and night, and sun and moon and stars, and all 
inanimate things. 

Sitting on a rock on the edge of one of these head- 
lands I could watch those glorious fishers in the sea, 
the gannets, by the hour ; but this bird is so great, 
being now the greatest left to us in Cornwall, or 
rather in the seas that wash its shores, and its habits 
so interesting, that I must by and by devote an en- 
tire chapter to it. Gulls and daws were the common 
species, always to be seen floating and wheeling about 
the promontory, a black and white company, with 
sharp yelping voices and hoarse and laughter-like 
cries ; never wholly free from anxiety when I was by, 
never fully convinced of my peaceful intentions. 
Their habits are well known : I was not expecting any 
new discovery about them, it was simply the delight 



66 THE LAND'S END 

of seeing them which kept me to the crags. Sturge 
Moore says in a poem on " Wings " : — 

That man who wishes not for wings, 

Must be the slave of care ; 
For birds that have them move so well 

And softly through the air : 
They venture far into the sky, 
If not so far as thoughts and angels fly. 

Feather from under feather springs ; 

All open like a fan ; 
Our eyes upon their beauty dwell 

And marvel at the plan 
By which things made for use so rare 
Are powerful and delicate and fair. 

In Calderon's celebrated drama, Life's a Dream, 
when Sigismund laments his miserable destiny, com- 
paring it with that of the wild creatures which in- 
habited the forest where he is kept a prisoner, the 
contrast between his lot and theirs seems greatest 
when he considers the birds, perfect in form, lovely in 
colouring, graceful in their motions, and so wonder- 
ful in their faculty of flight ; while he, a being with 
a higher nature, a greater, more aspiring soul, had no 
such liberty ! We need not be so unhappy as the 
Polish prince to envy the birds their freedom. I 
watch and am never tired of watching their play. 
They rise and fall and circle, and swerve to this side 
and to that, and are like sportive flies in a room which 
has the wind-roughened ocean for a floor, and the 
granite cliffs for walls, and the vast void sky for 
ceiling. The air is their element : they float on it 



CASTLES BY THE SEA 67 

and are borne by it, abandoned to it, effortless, even 
as a ball of thistledown is borne ; and then, merely 
by willing it, without any putting forth of strength, 
without a pulsation, to rise vertically a thousand feet, 
to dwell again and float upon an upper current, 
to survey the world from a greater altitude and re- 
joice in a vaster horizon. To fly like that ! To do 
it all unconsciously, merely by bringing this or that 
set of ten thousand flight muscles into play, as we 
will to rise, to float, to fall, to go this way or that— to 
let the wind do it all for us, as it were, while the sight 
is occupied in seeing and the mind is wholly free ! 
The balloons and other wretched machines to which 
men tie themselves to mount above the earth serve 
only to make the birds' lot more enviable. I would 
fly and live like them in the air, not merely for the 
pleasure of the aerial exercise, but also to experience 
in larger measure the sense of sublimity. 

But this is a delusion, seeing that we possess such 
a sense only because we are bound to earth, because 
vast clifFs overhanging the sea and other altitudes are 
in some degree dangerous. At all events Nature 
says they are, and we are compelled to bow to her 
whether we know better or not. We cannot get over 
the instinct of the heavy mammalian that goes on the 
ground, whose inherited knowledge is that it is death 
or terrible injury to fall from a considerable height. 
Only so long as we are quite safe is this instinct a 
pleasurable one ; but when we look over the edge of 
a sheer precipice, how often, in spite of reason, does 
the pleasure, the fearful joy, lose itself in apprehen- 



68 THE LAND'S END 

sion ! Could we know that it would not hurt us to 
drop off, purposely or by accident, that the air itself 
and a mysterious faculty in us would sustain us, 
that it would no more hurt us to be flung from 
the summit of a cliff than it would hurt a jackdaw, 
we should be as the bird is, without a sense of sub- 
limity. 

Daw and herring gull, the most abundant species, 
were but two of several kinds I was accustomed to 
see from the headlands, and some of the others were 
greater birds — the great black-backed gull, as big a 
gull as there is in the world, who had a rock to him- 
self near the Land's End, where four or five couples 
could be seen congregated ; and the shag, the cor- 
morant which abounds most on this coast. They are 
heavy, ungainly flyers, and have an ugly reptilian look 
when fishing in the sea, but seen standing erect and 
motionless, airing their spread wings, they have a 
noble decorative appearance, like carved bird-figures 
on the wet black jagged rocks amid the green and 
white tumultuous sea. There, too, was the ancient 
raven, and he was the most irreconcilable of all. At 
one spot on the cliff close to where I was staying a 
solitary raven invariably turned up to shadow me. 
He would fly up and down, then alight on a rock a 
hundred yards away or more and watch me, occa- 
sionally emitting his deep hoarse human-like croak ; 
but it failed to frighten me away or put me in a 
passion, as I was not a native. The Cornishman of 
the coast, when he hears that ominous sound, mocks 
the bird : " Corpse ! corpse ! you devil ! If I had a 



CASTLES BY THE SEA 



69 



gun I'd give you corpse ! " It is not strange the 
raven views the human form divine with suspicion in 
these parts : he is much persecuted by the religious 
people hereabouts, and when they cannot climb up or 
down to his nest on a ledge of the cliff, they are 
sometimes able to destroy it by setting fire to a furze 
bush and dropping it upon the nest from above. 

The rocky forelands I haunted were many, but the 
favourite one was Gurnard's Head, situated about 




THE LOGAN ROCK 



midway between St. Ives and Land's End. It is the 
grandest and one of the most marked features of that 
bold coast. Seen from a distance, from one point of 
view, the promontory suggests the figure of a Sphinx, 
the entire body lying out from the cliff, the waves 
washing over its huge black outstretched paws and 
beating on its breast, its stupendous deformed face 
composed of piled masses of granite looking out on 
the Atlantic. I was often there afterwards, spending 
long hours sitting on the rocks of the great head and 



70 THE LAND'S END 

shoulders, watching the sea and the birds that live 
in it ; and later, when April set the tiny bell of the 
rock pipit tinkling, and the wheatear, hovering over 
the crags, dropped his brief delicious warble, and when 
the early delicate flowers touched the rocks and turf 
with tender, brilliant colour, I was more enamoured 
than ever of my lonely castle by the sea. Forced to 
leave it I could but chew samphire and fill my pockets 
with its clustered green finger-like leaves, so as to 
have the wild flavour of that enchanting place as long 
as possible in my mouth and its perfume about me. 

Now I wish only to relate an adventure which 
befell me on that midwinter day on the occasion 
of my first visit, when nothing happened and I saw 
nothing particular except with the mind's eye, for 
this was an adventure of the spirit. 

It was one of those perfect days when the sun 
shines from an unclouded sky and the wind that 
raves without ceasing at last falls asleep and the 
whole world sleeps in the warm, brilliant light, 
albeit with eyes wide open like a basking snake. I 
was abroad early, and after wandering over a good 
many miles of moor and climbing several hills I 
arrived at my destination, tired and very hungry, 
and the first thing I did was to lunch heartily on 
bread and cheese and beer at the inn which you find 
at a short distance from the promontory. Naturally 
after my meal and an hour's scramble over the rough 
rocks of the headland I felt disposed to take a good 
rest before setting out on my return, and I soon 
found a suitable spot — a slab of stone lying with a 




*<■'' 



GURNARD'S HEAD 



To face page 70 



CASTLES BY THE SEA 71 

slope to the sea on the edge of the crag. It was like 
a table-top with a rich cloth of grey and orange- 
coloured lichen covering it, and was very warm in 
the sun, and to make it more comfortable I rolled 
up my waterproof and put it under my head, so that 
lying there at full length I could still look at the sea 
and the gulls and gannets passing and repassing 
before me. 

In a very few minutes I began to grow drowsy. 
So much the better, I thought ; for never is sleep 
more sweet and refreshing to a tired man than when 
it comes to him under the wide sky on a warm day. 
The sensation of being overcome is itself very de- 
lightful, so I did not resist but welcomed it, albeit 
quite conscious that it was there in me and would 
soon have me in its power. In a vague way I even 
felt interested and amused at the process : I could 
imagine that the spirit of sleep was there in person, 
kneeling on the rock behind my head and making her 
passes, until the wide sea and wide sky began to seem 
all of one colour and the figures of the gulls and 
gannets to grow vaguer as they passed before me. 
Presently I was in that state when the mind ceases 
to think, when the place of thought is taken by 
pictures from memory, which come, as it were, floating 
before us to pass away and be succeeded by others 
and still others without any connection. They are 
not "suggestions of contiguity " nor even of "anal- 
ogy " : they are not suggestions at all, and come we 
know not how or why. 

Now among these visions or pictures of things seen 



72 THE LAND'S END 

or heard or read of there was one described in a poem 
called "The Hunter's Vision," which had been lying for 
years unknown or forgotten in some dusty lumber- 
room of the brain. I read it first in my early years, 
and though it was poor poetry it powerfully affected 
me, partly because I was a hunter myself in those 
days, although only a boy hunter, and often wandered 
far into lonely places, and sometimes when faint with 
heat and fatigue I rested and even fell asleep in 
the shadow of a bush or of my own horse. The 
poem relates how the tired hunter at noon sat down 
to rest on a jutting crag on the steep mountain side 
where he had been climbing, and how when gazing 
before him the burning heavens and vast plains of 
earth, scorched brown by the summer sun, grew misty 
and dim to his sight, then gradually changed to a 
vision of his early home. He knew it well — the old 
familiar scene — and those who were assembled there 
to welcome him ; how could he but know them — his 
long dead and long lost ; they were there gazing at 
him and some were coming with outstretched arms 
towards him, their faces shining with joy. The very 
words of the poem came back to me with the picture : — 

Forward with fixed and eager eyes 
The hunter leaned in act to rise. 

But he leaned too far in his eagerness and slipped from 
the crag and woke, if he ever woke at all, to know for 
one brief, bitter moment that he was lost for ever. 

It is a story to be told, whether in verse or prose, 
in the simplest, directest manner ; for is there a more 



CASTLES BY THE SEA 73 

poignant grief than that of the lonely, weary man, 
especially in some solitary place, who remembers his 
loneliness, that he is divided by death and change and 
absence from his own kin who were dearer than all 
the world to him ? And just as his thought is the 
saddest, so the dream of a return to and reunion with 
the lost ones is assuredly the most blissful he can know. 

Now, on the verge of sleep, seeing that picture 
pass before me — the ineffable sadness of the lonely 
hunter in the wilderness, the vision, the unutterable 
joy, and the fearful end, I thought (for thought now 
came to me) of my own case — my loneliness, for I, 
too, was lonely, not because I was there by myself on 
that promontory, but because a whole ocean and the 
impassable ocean of death separated me from my own 
people. Then it came into my mind that I, too, fast 
falling into oblivion, would experience that blissful 
vision ; that the hoarse sound of the sea far below on 
the rocks would sink and change to the sound of the 
summer wind in the old poplars, that I would see the 
old roof and all those I first knew and loved on the 
earth — see them as in the old days " returned in 
beauty from the dust," and seeing them should start 
forward " in act to rise," and so end my wanderings 
by falling from that sloping, perilous rock ! 

In a moment I became wide awake, for I did not 
wish to perish by accident just yet, and, jumping 
up, I stretched out my arms, stamped with my feet, 
and rubbed my eyes vigorously to get rid of my 
drowsiness ; then sat down quietly and resumed my 
watch of gulls and gannets. 




^ 







CHAPTER VII 



THE BRITISH PELICAN 



The gannet — Gannets at St. Ives — At Treen Dinas — Appearance of 
the bird when fishing — The rise before the fall — Gannet and 
gull — A contrast — Gull and Great Northern Diver — Gulls and 
gannets in the pilchard season — Bass, pollack and sand-eels — An 
extraordinary accident. 

RITISH pelican " may seem almost too grand 
a name for a bird the size of our gannet, or 
Solan goose ; but he is of that family, and 
was once, in the Linnsean classification, of the very 
genus — a Pelkanus. Moreover, in this land of small 
birds — thanks to the barbarians who have extirpated 
the big ones — the Sula bassana is very large, being 
little inferior to the goose, though he is certainly 
small compared with his magnificent rose-coloured 
relation, the greatest of the true pelicans. 

Until I came to Cornwall I never had a proper op- 
portunity of observing this noble fowl and his fishing 
methods ; here he is common all round the coast, 
especially in the winter months, and when, as fre- 

74 



THE BRITISH PELICAN 75 

quently happens, he fishes close to the land, he may 
be watched very comfortably by the hour from a seat 
on some high foreland. A rock two or three hundred 
feet above the sea is the very best position for the 
spectator ; the birds float to and fro almost on a level 
with his eyes, and their beautiful motions can be better 
seen than from a boat or ship. 

Standing on the yellow sands in the little cove 
behind St. Ives I watched the tide coming in one 
rough cloudy evening, the sea as it advanced rising 
into big glassy billows of a clear glaucous green 
colour before bursting in foam and spray running far 
and wide over the pale smooth sandy floor. Close 
behind the advancing waves a number of birds were 
flying to and fro, mostly herring gulls, but there were 
also a good many gannets. These moved up and 
down in a series of wide curves at a rate of speed 
which never varied, with two or three or four beats 
of the powerful, pointed, black-tipped white wings, 
followed by a long interval of gliding ; the bird 
always keeping at a height of about twenty-five feet 
above the surface, and, without an instant's pause or 
hesitation, dashing obliquely into the sea after its 
prey. 

That is how they fish sometimes, flying low and 
seeing the fishes a good distance ahead, and is but one 
of several methods. When next I was watching them 
their manner was very different. The air was calm 
and clear and full of bright sunlight, and I watched 
them from the stupendous mass of rock forming the 
headland on which stands the famous Logan Rock. 



76 THE LAND'S END 

The birds were in considerable numbers, sweeping 
round in great curves and circles at a uniform height 
of about two hundred and fifty feet from the surface. 
They were distributed over an immense area ; rang- 
ing, in fact, over the entire visible sea, from those that 
fished within a couple of hundred yards off" the rocks 
on which I sat, to the furthest away, which appeared 
as moving white specks on the horizon. When fish- 
ing from that height the gannet drops straight down 
on its prey, striking the sea with such force as to send 
up a column of water eight or ten feet high, the bird 
disappearing from sight for a space of five or six 
seconds, or longer, then rising and after floating a few 
moments on the surface rising laboriously to resume 
its flight as before. 

The fall of the big white bird from such a height 
is a magnificent spectacle, and causes the spectator to 
hold his breath as he watches it with closed wings 
hurl itself down as if to certain perdition. The tre- 
mendous shock of the blow on the sea would certainly 
kill the bird but for the wad of dense elastic plumage 
which covers and protects it. For it hits itself as 
hard as it hits the sea, and how hard that is we may 
know when we watch the gannet drop perpendicularly 
like a big white stone, and when at a distance of a 
quarter of a mile we can see the column of water 
thrown up and distinctly hear the loud splash. Yet 
no sooner has it hurled itself into the sea than it is 
out again as if nothing had happened, ready for 
another fall and blow ! 

One wonders how, when the gannet is flying high, 



THE BRITISH PELICAN 77 

on catching sight of a fish directly beneath him in the 
water, he is able instantly to check his course, get 
into position and fall just at the right spot. One 
would suppose that he could not do it, that the im- 
petus of so heavy a body moving swiftly through the 
air would carry him many yards beyond the spot, and 
that he would have to return and search again. 
He does not, in fact, bring himself to a sudden stop 
as the small light kestrel is able to do, nor does he, I 
think, keep the fish all the time in his eye, but he is 
nevertheless able to accomplish his purpose, and in 
this way : The instant a fish is detected the bird 
shoots up a distance of a dozen to twenty teet ; thus 
the swift motion is not arrested, but its direction 
changed from horizontal to vertical, and this is prob- 
ably brought about by a lightning-quick change in the 
set of the wing feathers ; but it is a change which the 
eye cannot detect, even with the aid of the most 
powerful binocular. The upward movement is not 
exactly vertical ; it describes a slight curve, and, at 
the top, when the impetus which carried him up has 
spent itself, the bird wheels round, turning half over 
and bringing his head down, pointing to the sea. I 
suppose that he then quickly recovers the fish he had 
lost sight of for a moment, for with a pause of scarcely 
a second he then closes his wings and lets himself fall. 
On this calm, bright day, with scores of birds in 
sight, I was well able to observe this beautiful aerial 
manoeuvre — a sort of looping the loop, and seemingly 
an almost impossible feat which they yet accomplish 
with such apparent ease. 



78 THE LAND'S END 

The spectacle of many gannets fishing, all moving 
in a perpetual series of curves, wavering lines and 
half circles, at exactly the same altitude, and all per- 
forming the same set of actions on spying a fish, 
produces the idea that they are automata moved by 
extraneous forces, and are incapable of varying their 
mode of action. As a fact, they vary it constantly 
according to the state of the atmosphere and the sea, 
and probably also the depth at which the fish are 
swimming. But whatever the method for the day 
may be, one is impressed and amazed at the marvellous 
energy of the bird, and this strikes us most when we 
see gannets and gulls together. 

The gull is a waiter on the tide, and on wind and 
rain and sunshine and any change which may bring 
him something to eat — a sort of feathered Mr. 
Micawber among sea-birds. His indolent happy- 
go-lucky way of making a living reminds you 
of his friend the fisherman who, when not fish- 
ing, can do nothing but lounge on the quay with 
his hands in his pockets, or stand leaning against 
a sunny wall revolving the quid in his mouth and 
making an occasional remark to the idler nearest to 
him. His brief and furious fits of activity are 
followed by long intervals of repose, when he floats 
at the will of wind and wave on the sea or sits 
dozing on a rock. He also spends a good deal of 
his time in a kind of loitering, probably waiting for 
something to turn up, when he is seen in a loose 
company scattered far and wide about the sea, one 
here, two or three a little distance off, and a few more 



THE BRITISH PELICAN 79 

a hundred yards away; others flying about in an aim- 
less way, dropping down at intervals as if to exchange 
remarks with those on the water, then wandering off 
again. 

One day sitting on a rock at Gurnard's Head, I 
watched a company of forty or fifty gannets fishing 
in a calm sea where a great many herring and lesser 
black-backed gulls were scattered about idly rocking 
on the surface in their usual way. The gannets were 
sweeping round at a height of about a hundred feet, 
and were finding fish in plenty as their falls into the 
sea were pretty frequent. The gulls saw nothing, or 
knew that the fishes were not for them, and they were 
consequently not in the least excited. By and by 
I saw a gannet drop upon the sea just where two 
gulls were floating, sending a cloud of spray over 
one bird and causing both to rock and toss about like 
little white boats in a whirlpool. I could imagine 
one of those gulls gasping with astonishment and 
remarking to his fellow : " That was a nice thing, 
wasn't it ! Coming down on me like that without a 
by-your-leave ! I suppose if the fish had been swim- 
ming right under me he would have run me through 
with his confounded beak ; and when he had shaken 
me off" and seen me floating dead on the water, he 
would have said that it served me jolly well right for 
getting in his way ! Certainly these gannets are the 
greatest brutes out — but what fishers ! — and what 
splendid fellows ! " 

Gulls are all robbers by instinct but have not the 
power and courage of the predaceous Bonxie or Great 



80 THE LAND'S END 

Skua of the Shetlands, a pirate by profession who 
lives mainly on the labours of others. The gull must 
fend for himself and levy tribute when he gets the 
chance, when he can intimidate some other bird or 
snatch a morsel from his beak. From the gannet he 
gets nothing ; it would be dangerous for him to come 
in that bird's way, and no sooner is the fish caught 
than it is swallowed. The gannet takes no more 
notice of the gull than of a bubble floating on the 
surface, and probably does not even know that the 
negligible bird regards his fishing operations with a 
good deal of interest and hungrily wishes he could 
have a share in the spoil. But how far gulls will go 
in their desire to get something for nothing may be 
seen in the following incident which was witnessed by 
some fishermen at Sennen Cove, close to the Land's 
End. A Great Northern Diver made its appearance at 
the cove and spent a part of the winter there, and as 
he was not disturbed and grew accustomed to the 
sight of human beings he lost all shyness and often 
fished close to the rocks where the men stood watch- 
ing him. One day they saw him with a small flat 
fish which he could not swallow ; it was too broad to 
go down his gullet, but he would not let it escape 
and continued to toss it up and catch it again, as if 
determined to get it down somehow. Or it may 
have been that he was only playing with it just as a 
cat when not hungry plays with a mouse. By and by 
a black-backed gull swam to him and began following 
him and making snatches at the flounder each time 
the diver tossed it up. But the diver would not let 



THE BRITISH PELICAN 81 

him have the fish, he simply turned round to get 
away from the teasing gull, and the quiet way in 
which he took it only emboldened the other until 
he became quite excited and was almost violent in 
his efforts to get the fish. Then suddenly the diver, 
dropping the fish, turned on him and struck him like 
lightning, driving his sharp powerful beak into his 
neck or the base of the skull. The gull flapped his 
wings violently once or twice, then turned over and 
floated away, belly up, quite dead. Instantly after 
dealing the blow, the diver went down and quickly 
reappeared with the flounder, and resumed tossing 
and catching it again, just as if nothing had happened, 
while the dead gull slowly drifted further and further 
away. 

What struck the men who witnessed the tragic 
incident as most remarkable was the sudden change 
in the temper of the diver, when he turned at last on 
the other, dealt him the swift killing blow, then 
immediately returned to his play with the fish as if 
the slaying of that big formidable bird had affected 
him no more than it would have done to shake off a 
drop of water. My thought on hearing about it was 
that the act of the diver was wonderfully like that of 
many a human being to whom killing is no murder, 
who kills in a casual way because of some religious or 
ethical or political idea, or merely because he has been 
annoyed or stung into a fit of anger, and who, the 
killing done, recovers his normal placid temper and 
thinks no more about it. 

An exceedingly painful incident of this kind is 



82 THE LAND'S END 

related by Darwin in describing the natives of 
Tierra del Fuego in his Voyage of a Naturalist. An- 
other very pathetic case is related by Browning, in 
the Dramatic Idylls^ in which the woodcutter in a 
Russian village who is able to handle his axe so deftly 
strikes off the head of a young woman who has just 
escaped from the wolves that pursued her in the forest. 
They sprang upon her in her sleigh and dragged her 
child from her arms ; the pious woodcutter thought 
she should have allowed herself to be torn to pieces 
before releasing the child. Then, after striking 
her head off he goes to his cottage, puts down the 
axe, and plays with his children on the floor and is 
greatly surprised that any fuss should be made by 
his fellow-villagers at what he had done. 

The gulls have a particularly uncomfortable time 
when, as occasionally happens during the pilchard 
fishing, a number of gannets appear to claim their 
share in the spoil. No sooner has the circle of the 
seine been completed, forming a pool teeming with 
fish in the sea as it were, than the gulls are there in a 
dense crowd. Then if the gannets appear hovering 
over them and hurling themselves down like rocks 
into the seine the gulls scatter in consternation and 
have to wait their turn. The wonder is that the 
gannets diving with such violence, bird following bird 
so closely, all in so small an area, do not collide and 
kill each other. Somehow as by a miracle they escape 
accidents, and when they have gorged until they can 
gorge no more they retire to digest their meal at sea, 
and immediately the gulls return to feast with a tre- 



THE BRITISH PELICAN 83 

mendous noise and much squabbling, each bird 
fighting to deprive his neighbour of the fish he 
picks up. This lasts until the gannets, having 
quickly digested their first meal or got rid of it 
by drinking sea-water, return with a fresh appetite 
for a second one, and the poor gulls are once more 
compelled to leave that delectable spot, teeming and 
glittering with myriads of rushing, leaping, terrified 
pilchards. 

At other times, when fishing-birds are attracted to 
one spot by shoals of mackerel, herring, sprats or 
pilchards, gulls and gannets feast together very com- 
fortably, and as the gulls take good care not to get in 
the way of their too energetic neighbours there are 
probably no accidents. Occasionally at such times 
they have an opportunity of feeding on the launce or 
sand-eel, a favourite food of all the rapacious crea- 
tures, fish and fowl, that get their living in the sea. 
The launce is a long slender eel-like silvery fish that 
has the curious habit of burying itself in the sand, 
and it is said that when out feeding if pursued it in- 
stinctively darts down to the bottom of the sea to 
escape by burying itself in the sand. Bass and pol- 
lack are the greatest persecutors of the launce, and 
when a number of these greedy fishes come upon a 
shoal of sand-eels in deep water they get beneath 
them to hold them up, and surround them as well to 
prevent their escape. Day, in his British Fishes, states 
that pollack have been observed acting in this way on 
the coast of Norway ; but many Cornish fishermen 
have witnessed it too, though it has not been de- 



8 4 THE LAND'S END 

scribed by Jonathan Couch and other writers on the 
habits of the native fishes as occurring in our waters. 

o 

A native of Hayle, a boatman and a keen observer of 
bird and fish life, gave me the following account of a 
scene he witnessed in St. Ives Bay, not far from the 
Godrevy Lighthouse. His attention was attracted by 
a great concourse of gulls and gannets, and rowing 
to the spot he found the surface of the sea boiling 
with an immense shoal of sand-eels rushing about on 
the surface and leaping clean out of the water in their 
efforts to escape from their pursuers. It was a very 
unusual sight, as the shoals of sand-eels are usually 
small, but here they swarmed at the surface over a 
very large area — probably six or seven acres. It was 
a fine bright day and the water being marvellously 
clear he could see the pollack ranging swiftly about at 
a considerable depth and rising at intervals to the 
surface to capture their prey. Meanwhile the birds 
in hundreds were hovering overhead, the gannets 
coming down in their usual way like huge stones 
hurled into the sea, the gulls swooping lightly and 
snatching their prey and rising with the long silvery 
wriggling fishes in their beaks. 

Every gull thus rising with a launce in its beak was 
of course instantly pursued and set upon by all the 
others flying near and had to fight furiously to retain 
his capture. 

That is invariably the gull's way : even when fish 
are swarming on the surface and easily taken they 
must give vent to their predatory instincts and waste 
time and energy in robbing one another and in squab- 



THE BRITISH PELICAN 85 

bling and screaming, instead of every bird trying to 
catch as many as he can for himself. It is very differ- 
ent with the gannet ; he never in all his life — and it 
may be a life of a century or longer for all we know 
to the contrary — wastes as much energy as would be 
the equivalent of a single feather's weight in trying 
to take a morsel out of the beak of another gannet 
or bird of any kind. One might say that his faculties 
are so perfect, his power so great, that he has no need 
to descend to such courses. Indeed, so admirably is 
he fitted for his sea life, that when we view him in 
very bad weather, when he is travelling, following the 
coastline, in an everlasting succession of beautiful 
curves and wave-like risings and fallings ; and when 
he is fishing, even when the sky is black with tem- 
pests and the tumbling ocean is all grey and white 
with whirling spindrift ; when the furious wind has 
blown the whole tribe of gulls inland many a league, 
he appears to us as a part of it all — of wave and 
spray and wind and cloud — a fragment, one of a 
million, torn away by the blast, into which a guiding 
spirit or intelligent principle or particle has been 
blown to make it cohere and give it form and weight 
and indestructibility. 

I can but express it in my blundering fashion, but 
the thought has been in my mind when, sitting on 
a rock on some high foreland, I have watched the 
gannets passing by the hour, travelling to some dis- 
tant feeding area or to their breeding haunts in the 
far north ; a procession many a league long, but 
a very thin procession of twos and twos, every bird 



86 THE LAND'S END 

with his mate, following the trend of the coast, each 
bird in turn now above the sea, now down in the 
shelter of a big incoming wave, and every curve and 
every rise and fall of one so exactly repeated by the 
other as to give the idea of a bird and its shadow or 
reflection, with bird and reflection continually chang- 
ing places. 

After seeing the gannet every day for months one 
would be apt to think that this species is incapable of 
making a mistake and is beyond reach of accidents, 
but that cannot be supposed of any living creature, 
however perfect the correspondence may appear 
between it and the environment. At Sennen I heard 
of an extraordinary mishap which befell and caused 
the destruction of a large number of gannets. It 
was told to me by several of the fishermen who wit- 
nessed it at Sennen Cove, at the Land's End, and by 
a gentleman of the place, who is a keen ornithologist 
and was present at the time. A strong wind was 
blowing straight into the bay, and there was a very 
big sea on. The sea, they told me, presented a sin- 
gular appearance on account of the enormous waves 
rolling in ; the village people, in fact, were all out 
watching it. A large number of gannets were busy 
fishing and were coming further and further in, fol- 
lowing the shoal. Then a wonderful thing hap- 
pened on this day of wonders ; the wind which had 
been blowing a gale fell quite suddenly and was suc- 
ceeded in a very few minutes by a perfect calm. 
Some of the men assured me they had never known 
such a thing happen before. I have known it once, 



THE BRITISH PELICAN 87 

and that was in South America, when a violent south- 
west wind which had been blowing for many hours 
dropped suddenly, and the air was a dead calm before 
the loud noise of the gale in the trees was out of my 
ears. The change was disastrous to the gannets ; in 
that windless atmosphere in the sheltered bay and 
with the sea in that state they could not rise. They 
were seen struggling on the water and carried shore- 
wards by the huge incoming waves ; but their fellows 
flying to and fro above them, intent on their prey, 
did not see or heed their distress ; they continued 
dashing down into the sea, bird after bird, and every 
one that hurled itself down remained down, until 
they were all in the sea, all vainly flapping and 
struggling to keep out and still being carried nearer 
and nearer to the shore. Then the waves began to 
fling them out on the flat sandy beach, and as wave 
followed wave, bringing more and more of the birds, 
the men and boys who were watching went mad with 
excitement and set off at a run, every one as he went 
snatching up a stick or an iron bar or whatever would 
serve as a weapon. There was no escape for the 
birds, for their wings could not lift them, and they 
were slaughtered without mercy, even as shipwrecked 
men on this dreadful coast in the ancient days had 
been slaughtered, and the sands were covered with 
their carcasses. The ancient wreckers got something 
from the unhappy wretches they slew, but these 
people got nothing from the gannets. 1 asked them 
why they slew the birds, and they could only shrug 
their shoulders or answer that they had the birds cast 



88 THE LAND'S END 

out by the sea at their mercy — what was there to do 
but to kill them ? And it was added that after all, 
being dead, they did serve some good purpose, for 
by and by a farmer came and carried them away by 
cartloads to manure his land. 



CHAPTER VIII 
BIRD LIFE IN WINTER 

Land birds — Gulls in bad weather — Jackdaw and donkeys — Birds in 
the field — Yellowhammers — A miracle of the sun — The common 
sparrow — An old disused tin-mine— Sparrows roosting in a pit — 
Magpies' language — Goldcrests in the furze bushes — The Cornish 
wren — The sad little Meadow Pipit. 

A GOOD deal of space has already been given 
to the sea-birds of this coast, but the land- 
birds deserve a chapter too. I do not wish, 
however, to give an account or a list of all of them, 
but would rather follow Carew's example, and note 
only " such as minister some particular cause of re- 
membrance." The reader who would have more than 
this must seek for it in one of those " hasty schedules 
or inventories of God's property made by some 
clerk " — the local ornithologies and lists of species 
in the Victorian and other histories and various other 
works. On this exposed, wind-beaten, treeless coast 
country one does not expect to find an abundant or 

89 



90 THE LAND'S END 

varied bird life ; nevertheless in this unpromising 
place and in winter I had altogether a very pleasant 
time with the feathered people. 

When the weather was too bad for the cliffs the 
gulls were driven inland. Gannets and cormorants 
could endure it ; the sea was their true home and 
abiding-place and they were not to be torn from it ; 
but the vagrant, unsettled and somewhat unballasted 
gulls would not or could not stay, and were like froth 
of the breakers which is caught up and whirled 
inland by the blast. On such days (and they were 
many) the gulls were all over the land, wandering 
about in their usual aimless manner, or in flocks seen 
resting on the grass in the shelter of a stone wall, or 
mixing loosely with companies of daws, rooks, peewits 
and other skilful worm and grub hunters, waiting idly 
for the chance of snatching a morsel from a neigh- 
bour's beak. 

I was a little like the gulls in my habits : on fine 
days the cliffs and cliff castles were my favourite 
haunts ; in very rough weather my rambles were 
mostly away from the sea, where 1 had my old com- 
panions of the sea wall, the gulls and daws, still with 
me. So much has already been said of this last 
species in former chapters that I might appear to be 
giving him too great prominence to bring him in 
again. Yet I must do so just to relate a little scene I 
witnessed in which this bird had a principal part, the 
other characters being donkeys. 

The donkey is almost the only domestic creature one 
meets with out on the rough high moor and among 



BIRD LIFE IN WINTER 91 

the stony hills. Cows and horses are occasionally 
seen, but they do not strike one as native to the place 
as the donkey does. He is a sort of link between the 
homestead and the wilderness. The donkey is man's 
poor, patient, anciently-broken creature, but when he 
roams abroad in quest of that tough and juiceless 
fodder on the desolate heath and hillsides — a food 
thought good enough for the likes of him, or the likes 
of he, as his master would say — he fits into the scene 
as the cow and horse certainly do not. He is not so 
big, and his rough, dirty or dusty coat of dull indeter- 
minate greys and earthy and heather-like browns makes 
him harmonise with his surroundings. His long- 
drawn reiterated droning and whistling cry strikes one, 
too, as a voice of the wild incult places. On this 
account I have a very friendly feeling for him, and 
was always pleased at meeting with donkeys in my 
solitary walks, which was often enough, as most per- 
sons keep one or more in these parts. He is a good 
servant, and costs nothing to keep. Frequently I turn 
aside to speak to them, and as a rule they turn their 
backs or hinder parts on me, as much as to say that 
they have enough of human beings in the village : 
here they prefer to be left alone. But when I produce 
an apple from my pocket they at once think better of 
it, and gather round me very much interested in the 
apple, and quite willing for the sake of the apple to let 
me rub their noses and pull their ears. 

One day, walking softly through a thicket of very 
high furze bushes, I came to a small green open space 
in which were three donkeys, one lying stretched out 



92 THE LAND'S END 

full length on the bed of moss with a jackdaw sitting 
on his ribs busily searching for ticks or parasites of 
some kind and picking them from his skin. The 
other two donkeys were standing by, gazing at the 
busy bird and probably envying their comrade his 
good luck. My sudden appearance at a distance of 
two or three yards greatly alarmed them. Away 
flew the daw, and up jumped the recumbent donkey, 
and then all three stared at me, not at all pleased at 
the intrusion. 

It seemed to me on this occasion that in the daw, 
the friend and helper of our poor slave the donkey, 
the bird that in its corvine intelligence and cunning 
approaches nearest to ourselves among the avians, we 
have yet another link uniting man to his wild fellow- 
creatures. 

There is a good deal of rough weather but little 
frost in this district ; behind the cliffs, sheltered by 
stone hedges and thickets of furze, the green field is 
the chief feeding-ground of the birds ; there with the 
rooks and daws and gulls and peewits you find field- 
fares — the bluebird of the natives — and missel- 
thrushes in flocks, and the greybird, as the song- 
thrush is called, the blackbird and small troops of 
wintering larks. Most abundant is the starling, a 
winter visitor too, for he does not breed in this part 
of Cornwall. You will find a flock in every little 
field, and the sight of your head above the stone wall 
sends them off with a rush, emitting the low guttural 
alarm note which sounds like running water. 

The yellowhammer is a common resident species 




DONKEYS ON THE MOOR 



To face p.i;je 92 



BIRD LIFE IN WINTER 93 

here. We usually think him an uninteresting bird 
on account of his phlegmatic disposition and monoton- 
ous song, but in this district, in winter, I found him 
curiously attractive, and among the modestly-coloured 
birds that were his neighbours he was certainly the 
most splendid. That may appear a word better suited 
to the golden oriole, but I am thinking of one of his 
aspects, as I frequently saw him, and of a miracle of 
the sun. Here, in winter, he congregates in small 
companies or flocks at the farms, and at one small 
farm where there was a rather better shelter than at 
most of the others, owing to the way the houses and 
outhouses and ricks were grouped together, the com- 
pany of wintering yellowhammers numbered about 
eighty or ninety. Every evening, when there was 
any sun, these birds would gather on some spot — a 
rick or barn roof or on the dark green bushes — 
sheltered from the sea wind, where they could catch 
the last rays. Sitting motionless grouped together in 
such numbers they made a strangely pretty picture. 

One evening, at another farm-house, I was standing 
out of doors talking with the farmer, when the sun 
came out beneath a bank of dark cloud and shone 
level on the slate roof of a cow-house near us. It was 
an old roof on which the oxidised slate had taken a 
soft blue-grey or dove colour — the one beautiful 
colour ever seen in weathered slate ; and no sooner 
had the light fallen on it than a number of yellow- 
hammers flew from some other point where they had 
been sitting and dropped down upon this roof. They 
were scattered over the slates, and, sitting motionless 



94 THE LAND'S END 

with heads drawn in and plumage bunched out, they 
were like golden images of birds, as if the sun had 
poured a golden-coloured light into their loose 
feathers to make them shine. 

The grey wagtail and the goldfinch, in small 
numbers, both beautiful birds, were wintering here, 
but they could not compare with those transfigured 
yellowhammers I had seen. 

As for the vulgar sparrow, nothing — not even the 
miracle-working sun — could make him brilliant or 
beautiful to look at, and I have indeed acquired the 
habit of not looking and not seeing the undesired 
thing. That is, in the country : in London it is 
different ; there I can be thankful for the sparrow 
where he does us (and the better birds) no harm and 
lives very comfortably on the crumbs that fall trom 
our tables. Yet now, at one spot on this coast, I was 
surprised into paying particular attention to the spar- 
rows on account of a winter custom they had 
acquired. 

One day on very rough land, half a mile from the 
cliff, I came on a piece of ground of about two acres 
in extent surrounded by a big stone hedge, without 
gap or gate. It was the site of an old tin-mine 
abandoned fifty or sixty years ago and walled round 
to prevent the domestic animals from the neighbour- 
ing farms falling into the pits. It was strange that so 
much trouble had been taken for such an object, as in 
all the other disused mining pits I had come upon in 
the district the holes had simply been covered over 
with wood and big stones, or they remained open and 



BIRD LIFE IN WINTER 95 

the cattle were left to take their chance. The stone 
hedge was covered with a thick growth of furze, and 
the ground inside, protected as it was from the cattle 
and sheltered by the wall from the furious winds, had 
become a dense and in places impenetrable thicket of 
blackthorn, bramble, furze and ivy. So close did the 
blackthorn bushes grow with their upper branches 
tightly interwoven that it would have been possible to 
walk on the top of the thicket at a height of twelve 
or fourteen feet from the ground without the foot 
slipping through. There were three pits, and one, 
very much enlarged owing to the quantity of earth 
which had fallen in, was entirely occupied with a big 
elder bush, or tree — a curiosity in this treeless dis- 
trict. It was rooted in the side of the pit about 
fourteen feet below the surface, and its whole height 
was about thirty feet. Near the root the trunk 
divided into three great branches, or boles, and on 
the middle one there was an old magpie's nest on a 
level with my shoulders and a little beyond the reach 
of my hand. The birds were perhaps wise to build 
in such a place, since a boy could not easily rob it 
without danger of falling into the pit. 

On going to this walled-in thicket one evening 
I observed a vast concourse of sparrows. They were 
sitting on the bushes in thousands, and more birds in 
small companies of a dozen or so, and in small flocks 
of fifty to a hundred, were continually arriving and 
settling down among the others to add their voices to 
the extraordinary hubbub they kept up. It was like 
a starling's winter roosting-place, and the birds must 



96 THE LAND'S END 

have come from all the homesteads on either side for 
a good many miles. These birds, I found, roosted 
in the old pits, and when they had all disappeared 
from sight and the loud noise of chirruping had died 
into silence I walked up to one of the pits and stood 
over it. The birds took alarm and began to issue 
out, coming up in rushes of several hundreds at a 
time, rush succeeding rush at intervals of a few 
seconds while I stood by, but when I retired to some 
distance the birds would come up in a continuous 
stream which sometimes looked in the fading light 
like a column of smoke rising from the ground. 

Three months later, when the sparrows were breed- 
ing and spending their nights at home, I revisited the 
spot, and going to the pit with the elder tree growing 
in it had a fresh look at the old magpie nest. And 
there was Mag herself, sitting on her pretty eggs 
under her roof of thorny sticks ! After suffering 
my presence for about two minutes she slipped off 
and went away without a sound. Wishing her good 
luck I came away, as I did not want to make her 
unhappy by too long a visit. 

The magpie is extremely common in these parts 
although there are no trees for them to breed in. 
You meet with him twenty times a day when out 
walking. He flies up a distance ahead, rising verti- 
cally, and hovers a moment to get a good look at you, 
then hastens away on rapidly-beating wings and slopes 
off into the furze bushes, displaying his open gradu- 
ated tail. He haunts the homestead and is frequently 
to be seen associating with the poultry ; there are no 



BIRD LIFE IN WINTER 97 

pheasants here and no gamekeepers to shoot him, 
and, as in Ireland, the people do not like to injure 
though they do not love him. 

If you chance to hear a bird note or phrase that is 
new to you in this place you may be sure the magpie 
is its author. Like the jay he is an inventor of new 
sounds and has a somewhat different language for 
every part of the country. The loud brisk chatter, 
his alarm note, which resembles the tremulous bleat 
of a goat, is always the same ; but his ordinary lan- 
guage, used in conversation, when he is with his mate 
or a small party of friends, is curiously varied and full 
of surprises. It was one of my amusements in genial 
days in winter when a confabulation was in progress 
to steal as near as I could and sit down among the 
bushes to listen. 

On one such occasion, where the furze was very 
thick and high, 1 discovered that the bushes all round 
me teemed with minute, shadowy-looking bird-forms 
silently hopping and flitting about. They were 
golden-crested wrens wintering in this treeless place 
in considerable numbers. Some of the small boys I 
talked to in this neighbourhood knew the bird as the 
"Golden Christian Wrennie" — a rather pretty variant. 

But the Golden Christian Wrennie is not the wren — 
not the Cornish wren ; for there is a proper Cornish 
wren, even as there is a St. Kilda wren, and as there is 
a native wren, or local race or Troglodytes parvulus, in 
every county, in every village and farm-house and 
wood and coppice and hedge in the United Kingdom. 
He is a home-keeping little bird, and when you find 



98 THE LAND'S END 

him, summer or winter, in town or country, you know 
that he is a native, that his family is a very old one in 
that part and was probably settled there before the 
advent of blue-eyed man and the dawn of a Bronze 
Age. 

He is universal, and that gives one the idea that 
he is very evenly distributed ; but I had no sooner 
set foot in this " westest " part of all England than 
I found the wren more common than in any other 
part of the country known to me, and this greatly 
pleased me because of my love of him. Indeed, it 
was the prevalence of the wren which made the West 
Cornwall bird life seem very much to me, despite the 
fact that the best species have been extirpated or 
driven away and that no peregrine or chough or 
hoopoe, or other distinguished feathered stranger, 
can return to these shores and not be instantly massa- 
cred by the sportsmen, ornithologists and private 
collectors. But the common little wren is admired 
and respected by every one, even by the philistines. 
It is not that he seeks to ingratiate himself with us 
like the robin ; he is the very opposite of that 
friendly little creature, and indeed I like him as much 
for his independence as for his other sterling quali- 
ties. You may feed the birds every day in cold 
weather and have them gather in crowds to gobble up 
your scraps, but you will not find the wren among 
them. He doesn't want of your charity, and can get 
his own living in all seasons and in all places, rough 
or smooth, as you will find if you walk round the 
coast from St. Ives to Land's End or to Mount's Bay. 



BIRD LIFE IN WINTER 99 

Not a furze clump, nor stone hedge, nor farm build- 
ing, nor old ruined tin- mine, nor rocky headland, 
but has its wren, and go where you will in this half- 
desert silent place you hear at intervals his sharp 
strident note ; but not to welcome you. Your heavy 
footsteps have disturbed and brought him out of his 
hiding-place to look at you and vehemently express 
his astonishment and disapproval. And having done 
so he vanishes back into seclusion and dismisses the 
fact of your existence from his busy practical little 
mind. He is at home, but not to you. 'Tis the 
only home he knows and he likes it very well, finding 
his food and roosting by night and rearing his young 
just in that place, with fox and adder and other deadly 
creatures for only neighbours. Such a mite of a bird 
with such small round feeble wings and no more 
blood in him than would serve to wet a weasel's 
whistle ! Best of all it is to see him among the rude 
granite rocks of a headland, living in the roar of the 
sea : when the wind falls or a gleam of winter sun- 
shine visits earth you will find him at a merry game 
of hide-and-seek with his mate among the crags, 
pausing from time to time in his chase to pour out 
that swift piercing lyric which you will hear a thou- 
sand times and never without surprise at its power 
and brilliance. 

In these waste stony places, where the wren is 
common, another small feathered creature was with 
me just as often — the anxious, irresolute meadow 
pipit, or titlark, who is the very opposite in character 
to the brisk, vigorous, positive little brown bird whose 



ioo THE LAND'S END 

mind is made up and who does everything straight 
off. Nevertheless he gave me almost as much 
pleasure, only it was a somewhat different feeling — 
a pleasure of a pensive kind with something of mys- 
tery in it. He did not sing, even on those bright 
days or hours in January, which caused such silent 
ones as the corn bunting and pied wagtail to break 
out in melody. The bell-like tinkling strain he 
utters when soaring up and dropping to earth is for 
summer only : it is that taint fairy-like aerial music 
which you hear on wide moors and commons and lonely 
hillsides. In winter he has no language but that one 
sharp sorrowful little call, or complaint, the most 
anxious sound uttered by any small bird in these 
islands. It is a sound that suits the place, and when 
the wind blows hard, bringing the noise of the waves 
to your ears, and the salt spray ; when all the sky is 
one grey cloud, and sea mists sweep over the earth at 
intervals blurring the outline of the hills, that thin 
but penetrative little sad call seems more appropriate 
than ever and in tune with Nature and the mind. 
The movements, too, of the unhappy little creature 
have a share in the impression he makes ; he flings 
himself up, as it were, before your footsteps out of the 
brown heath, pale tall grasses and old dead bracken, 
and goes off as if blown away by the wind, then 
returns to you as if blown back, and hovers and goes 
to this side, then to that, now close to you, a little 
sombre bird, and anon in appearance a mere dead leaf 
or feather whirled away before the blast. During the 
uncertain flight, and when, at intervals, he drops upon 



BIRD LIFE IN WINTER 101 

a rock close by, he continues to emit the sharp sorrow- 
ful note, and if you listen it infects your mind with 
its sadness and mystery. You can imagine that the 
wind-blown feathered mite is not what it seems, a 
mere pipit, but a spirit of that place in the shape and 
with the voice of a mournful little bird — a spirit that 
cannot go away nor die, nor ever forget the unhappy 
things it witne°sed in pity and terror long ages gone 
when an ancient people, or a fugitive remnant, 
gathered at this desolate end of all the land — a tragedy 
so old that it was forgotten on the earth and those 
who had part in it turned to dust thousands of 
years ago. 




:V sk 



CHAPTER IX 

THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS 

A primitive type — Unintelligible speech — The little dark man — The 
prevailing type blonde — The Dawn in Britain- — Cornish speech and 
" naughty English " — Two modes of speaking — Voice and intona- 
tion — Chapel singing — The farmer's politics — Preachers and 
people — Life on a farm — Furze as fuel — Food — Healthy and 
happy children — Children in procession — The power of the child. 

NE afternoon I watched the gambols and mock 
fights of three ravens among the big boulder 
stones at a spot a little way back from the 
cliff, and seeing a man occupied in pulling up swedes 
in a field not very far off, I thought I would go and 
speak to him about the birds, as they haunted the 
spot regularly and he would perhaps be able to tell 
me if they ever bred in the neighbouring cliffs. I 
knew the man by sight, also that he was a native of 
the place and never in his fifty odd years had been 
further than about ten miles away from it. He called 
himself a " farmer," being the tenant of a small hold- 
ing of about a dozen or fifteen acres and a small 




THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS 103 

cottage which was the " farm-house." He was a 
curious-looking undersized man with a small narrow 
wizened face, small cunning restless eyes of no 
colour, and reddish yellow eyebrows, perpetually 
moving up and down. He reminded me of an 
orang-utan and at the same time of a wild Irishman 
of a very low type. 

I talked to him about the ravens, pointing to them, 
and he, presently recalling 1 dare say some exciting 
adventure he had met with in connection with the 
birds, began to tell me the strangest story I had ever 
listened to. It was absolutely unintelligible ; the 
strangeness was in his manner of delivering it. He 
grinned and he grimaced, swinging his long thin 
sinewy monkey-like arms about, jerking his body, 
and making many odd gestures, while pouring out a 
torrent of gibberish, interspersed with CafFre-like 
clicks and other inarticulate sounds ; then throwing 
himself back he stared up at me, wrinkling his fore- 
head, winking and blinking, as much as to say " Now 
what do you think of that ? " 

" Yes, just so ; dear me ! very wonderful ! " I 
returned ; and then, after treating me to another 
torrent, he threw himself back on his swedes and I 
walked off. 

I discovered that this little man, who, when ex- 
citedly talking and gesticulating, was hardly like a 
human being, was one of a type which is not ex- 
cessively rare on this coast. He differed from others 
of his kind whom I met only in his reddish colour. 
The proper colour of this kind is dark. On the 



io 4 THE LAND'S END 

St. Ives beach I one day saw another specimen. He 
was in the middle of an altercation with a carter who 
was loading his cart with dogfish which the fish- 
buyers had turned up their noses at and so it had to 
be sold for manure. He was in a state of intense 
excitement, dancing about on the sands and dis- 
charging a torrent of wild gibberish at the other. 
I remarked to a young Cornishman who was standing 
there looking on and listening, that I could not 
understand a word and could hardly believe that all 
the man's jabber really meant anything. " I can 
understand him very well," said the young man : 
"he is talking proper Cornish" 

At Sennen Cove I came upon yet another example: 
he too was in a dancing rage when I first saw him, 
chattering, screeching and gesticulating more like a 
frenzied monkey than a human being. The man he 
was abusing was a big stolid fisherman, who stood 
with his hands in his trouser pockets, a clay pipe in 
his mouth, perfectly unmoved, like a post : it was a 
wonderful contrast and altogether a very strange 
scene. 

This small, dark, peppery man, who is found 
throughout the country, and whose chief character- 
istics appear to be intensified in West Cornwall, is no 
doubt a survival or, more properly speaking, a rever- 
sion to a very ancient type in this country. At all 
events, there is a vast difference between this little 
blackie or brownie of Bolerium and the prevailing 
type. The man of the ordinary type is medium-sized 
and has a broad head, high cheek-bones, light hair, 



THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS 105 

and grey-blue eyes. The " recognised authorities " 
are not, I imagine, wholly to be trusted on the ques- 
tion of colour : the southern half of Hampshire 
appears to me more of a dark or black province than 
Cornwall. Probably the author of the noble epic, The 
Dawn in Britain^ was misled by the anthropologists 
when he made his Cornishmen who came to the war 
against the Roman a dark people : — 

Who came, strange island people, to the war, 
Men bearded, bearing moon-bent shields, unlike, 
Of a dark speech, to other Britons are 
Belerians, workers in the tinny mines 
Of Penrhyn Gnawd, which Bloody Foreland named, 
Decit their king upleads them, now in arms. 

At Calleva, in which the Romans were besieged by 
the Britons, in Book xiii, and again in Books xv 
and xvi, after the tremendous battle of the Thames, 
when the army of Claudius was opposed in its march 
to Verulam, and, finally, at Camulodunum, we meet 
with this contingent : — 

When swart Belerians, on blue Briton's part . . . 

Who midst moon-shielded swart Belerians rides 
Is Decit. . . . 

Halts swart Belerian king, lo, on his spear . . . 

Therefore have swart Belerians crowned his brow 
With holy misselden. 

This is odd in one to whom the Celts were a tall, 
fair-skinned, god-like people, and who, worshipping 
their memory, abhors and hurls curses at all the 



io6 



THE LAND'S END 



nations and races of the earth that were at enmity 
with them, from the conquering Romans back even 
to the little fierce, shrill, brown-skinned Iberians, 
" greedy as hawks," who had the temerity to oppose 
them even as in our own day the little yellow 
Japanese opposed the white and god-like Muscovites. 

For to his mind the 
events he relates are 
true, and the mighty 
men he brings before 
us, from Brennus to 
Caractacus, as real as 
any Beduin he hob- 
nobbed with in Arabia 
Deserta. Perhaps it 
is even odder, with 
regard to this epic, 
which is undoubtedly 
the greatest piece of 
literature the young 
century has produced, 
that it should be the 
work of an Irishman, and from beginning to end a 
glorification of the Celts, yet wholly and intensely 
Saxon in its character, with no trace of that special 
quality which distinguishes the Celtic imagination. 

To return. The speech of the Cornish people is 
another subject about which erroneous ideas may be 
got from reading. Norden wrote that the native lan- 
guage was declining in his day, and adds : "But of late 
the Cornishe men have much conformed themselves 




THE CORNISH CELT 



THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS 107 

to the use of the Englishe toung and their Englishe is 
equall to the beste." There is no doubt that he was 
speaking of the gentry, but hasty makers of books 
who came after him took it to mean that the people 
generally spoke good English, and this statement has 
been repeated in books down to the present day. 
Andrew Borde, in his Boke of the Introduction of Kno- 
ledge, 1542, wrote : " In Cornwall is two speeches, the 
one is naughty Englische, and the other Cornysshe 
speeche." The last has been long dead, and dead will 
remain in spite of the efforts of one enthusiast who 
hopes to revive it and has actually written a sonnet in 
Cornish just to prove that it can be done ; but 
" naughty Englische " is still generally spoken, though 
very much less naughty than the " proper Cornish " 
which I have described as quite unintelligible to a 
stranger. 

It was explained to me by a gentleman, resident for 
many years in West Cornwall, a student of the people, 
that they have two distinct ways of speaking, especi- 
ally in the villages along; the coast and in places much 
frequented by visitors. In speaking to strangers they 
enunciate their words with deliberation so as to be 
understood, and those among them who have a good 
deal of practice succeed very well ; but among them- 
selves they speak in a hurried manner, slurring over 
or omitting half the syllables in half the words, so 
that it is most difficult to follow them. I am con- 
vinced from my own observation that he is right. 
I have sat conversing with a knot of fishermen, and 
after a while become silent, pretending to fall into a 



108 THE LAND'S END 

brown study while listening all the time, and they, 
seeing me absorbed in my own thoughts, as they 
imagined, have dropped quite naturally into their 
own familiar lingo. 

Here is another instance. There was one cottage 
I always liked to visit to sit for an hour with the 
family and sometimes have a meal with them just for 
the pleasure of listening to the wife, a thin, active, 
voluble woman, who was a remarkably good speaker, 
and what was even more to me, a lover of all wild 
creatures — a rare thing in a Cornish peasant. Or 
perhaps I should say all creatures save one — the 
adder. Once, she told me, when she was a little girl 
she was running home over the furze-grown hill from 
school when she came upon an adder in the act of 
devouring a nestful of fledglings. She stood still and 
gazed, horror-stricken, as it slowly bolted bird after 
bird, and then fled home crying with grief and pain 
at what she had witnessed, and never from that day 
had she seen or thought of an adder without shudder- 
ing. Now it almost invariably happened that in 
relating her experiences she would become excited at 
the most interesting part, and in her heat speak more 
and more rapidly and change from plain understand- 
able English to " naughty English " or " proper 
Cornish," and so cause me to lose the very point of 
the story. Tonkin, the Cornish historian, when the 
old language was well - nigh dead, described the 
people's speech as a jargon " the peculiarity of which 
was a striking uncertainty of the speaker as to where 
one word left off and another began." 



THE PEOPLE 4lND THE FARMS 109 

The voice is not musical, but in young people who 
have not lost the quiet low manner of speaking ac- 
quired at school and gone back to the original noisy 
gabble, it often sounds pleasant. There is an intona- 
tion, or sing-song, which varies slightly in different 
localities : some fine ears can tell you to which village 
or " church-town," as they say, a man belongs by his 
intonation. As a rule it is a slight raising of the 
voice at the last, and dwelling on it, and on any word 
in the sentence on which the emphasis naturally falls, 
and is like singing. When you get young people 
with fresh, clear voices talking together with anima- 
tion, the speech falls into a kind of recitative and has 
a rather pleasing effect. But the voice appears to 
harden and grow harsh with years, and acquires a dis- 
agreeable metallic quality. A good singer is, I 
imagine, a great rarity. The loud and hearty sing- 
ing in the chapels is rather distressing. In a Bible 
Christian place of worship, when Baring Gould's hymn 
" Onward, Christian soldiers," was being sung, I was 
almost deafened by the way in which the congrega- 
tion bellowed out the lines — 

Hell's foundations tremble 
At our shout of praise. 

And small wonder, I thought, if any sense of harmony 
survives down there ! 

Of speaking and singing I heard more than enough 
during my first winter (1905-6), as it was a time of 
political agitation. The excitement was, however, 
mostly in the towns. Fishermen and miners were 



no THE LAND'S END 

almost to a man on the Liberal side, led by their 
ministers, who were eagerly looking to have their 
revenge on the Church ; while those on the land were, 
despite their Methodism, on the other side, but with 
small hopes of winning. They appeared to be in a 
reticent and somewhat sullen humour : it was hard to 
get a word out of them, but I one day succeeded 
with a farmer I was slightly acquainted with. I found 
him in a field mending a gate, and after telling him 
the news and guessing what his politics were, I teased 
him with little mocking remarks about the way things 
electoral were going, until he was thoroughly aroused, 
and burst out in a manner that fairly astonished me. 
Yes, he was a Conservative, he angrily exclaimed. 
Being on the land, what else could he be ? Only a 
blind fool or a traitor to his fellows could be anything 
different if he got his living from the land. He 
didn't knaw the man as thought different to he. But 
they — the farmers — were going to be beat, he knew 
well enough. 'Twas bound to be, seeing the other 
side had the numbers. They had the town people — 
small tradesmen, fishers, workmen and all them that 
passed their time leaning against a wall with their 
hands in their pockets — the unemployed as they was 
called now-days. We didn't use to call them that ! 
The Liberals with their promises had got them on 
their side. What did they think they'd get ? To 
live without work ? That pay would be better, 
clothes and food cheaper — miners to get two pounds 
a week, or three, 'stead of thirty shillings ; a fisher- 
man to get twice as much for his fish, so that after a 



THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS in 

good catch he'd be able to sit down and rest for six 
months ? No more work for we ! Yes, many 
expected that. Anyhow they'd all git something 
because 'twas promised 'em — better pay, better 
times. But you can't have something for nothing, 
can you ? Who's to pay for it then ? They don't 
bother about that ; 'twill have to come somehow — 
maybe from the land. Yes, the land's to pay for 
everything ! Did any of them town idlers, them that 
worked a day or two once a week or month — did 
they knaw what the land gave ? Did they knaw what 
'tis to git up before dawn every day, Sundays as well, 
and work all day till after dark, all just for a bare 
living ? But you work the land, they'll say, you don't 
own it — 'tis the landlords we've got to get it out of. 
'Twill come out of the profits. Will it ? That's just 
what I'd like to knaw. We pay a pound or two an 
acre with all the rough and stones, and we pay tithes. 
And what do the landlords git ? There's rich and 
poor and big and little among 'em, the same as in 
everything. If he owns a hundred thousand acres 
he's well off, however little the land pays. But what 
if he owns only a few small farms, like most of them 
in these parts — can he live and bring up his sons to 
be anything better than labourers, or just what we 
farmers are, out of it ? If I owned this land myself 
and had to pay all my landlord pays, I don't think I'd 
be much better off than I am now. I'd have to work 
the same. What do they mean, then, by saying the 
land will pay ? I knaw — I'll tell you. It means that 
the land's here and can't be hidden and can't be 



ii2 THE LAND'S END 

taken out of the country, and them who own it and 
them that make their living out of it can be robbed 
better than anybody else. That's how them that 
are not on the land will get their something for 
nothing. 

What most interested me was the manner in which 
this discourse was delivered. In conversation he had the 
hard metallic Cornish voice without any perceptible 
intonation ; now in his excitement he fell into some- 
thing like a chant, keeping time with hands and legs, 
swinging his arms, striking his foot on the ground, 
and jerking his whole body up and down. Even so 
might some Cornish warrior of the ancient days have 
harangued his followers and tried to inspire in them 
a fury equal to his own. Even the cows two or three 
fields away raised their heads and gazed in our direc- 
tion, wondering what the shouting was about. 

As for the matter of his discourse, he expressed 
the feeling common among the farming people — the 
fear of change was on them. The odd thing is that 
the people generally, including miners, fishermen and 
others of their class, are haters of innovation, even as 
the farmers are, which does not promise them some 
material benefit, and there is no doubt that in this 
case they did confidently expect some good thing, and 
it pleased them to think their ministers were on their 
side. They knew that their ministers were aiming 
at something which they cared very little about : it 
was an alliance and nothing more. They are not 
dominated by their ministers, and, excepting some of 
the local preachers, do not share their malignant hatred 



THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS 113 

of the Church. On the contrary I found it a usual 
thing for the chapel people to go occasionally to church 
as well, and many made it a practice to go every Sun- 
day to the evening service. It is also common for the 
chapel-goers to send for the vicar when in want of 
spiritual aid. The minister often enough tells the 
applicant to go to the vicar who is " paid to do it." 
I talked to scores of people about the education 
question and could hardly find one in ten to manifest 
the slightest interest in it. The people had no quarrel 
with the Church on that question, although their 
ministers were preaching to them every Sunday about 
it. These preachers were Scotchmen, Midlanders, 
Londoners — anything but Cornishmen — and in most 
cases knew as much about the Cornish as they did 
of the inhabitants of Mars. They knew what the 
Methodist Society wanted and that was enough for 
them. 

Now I cared little about all this political pother. 
While I listened and could not avoid listening, I was 
like one who hears a military band with loud braying 
of brass instruments and rub-a-dub of drums, but is 
at the same time giving an attentive ear to some small 
sound issuing from some leafy hiding-place in the 
vicinity — the delicate small warble of a willow-wren, 
let us say. And the willow-wren in this case was the 
real heart of the people, not all this imported artificial 
noise in the air. That alone was what interested me ; 
it was a relief to escape from the ridiculous hubbub 
into one of the small farm-houses, to live with the 
people in a house that never saw a newspaper, where 



ii4 THE LAND'S END 

the farmer and his wife minded their farm and were 
very proud of getting the highest price in the market 
for their butter. 

Life on these small farms is incredibly rough. 
One may guess what it is like from the outward 
aspect of such places. Each, it is true, has its own 
individual character, but they are all pretty much 
alike in their dreary, naked and almost squalid ap- 
pearance. Each, too, has its own ancient Cornish 
name, some of these very fine or very pretty, but 
you are tempted to rename them in your own mind 
Desolation Farm, Dreary Farm, Stony Farm, Bleak 
Farm, and Hungry Farm. The farm-house is a 
small low place and invariably built of granite, with 
no garden or bush or flower about it. The one I 
stayed at was a couple of centuries old, but no one 
had ever thought of growing anything, even a mari- 
gold, to soften its bare harsh aspect. The house 
itself could hardly be distinguished from the out- 
houses clustered round it. Several times on coming 
back to the house in a hurry and not exercising 
proper care I found I had made for the wrong door 
and got into the cow-house, or pig-house, or a shed 
of some sort, instead of into the human habitation. 
The cows and other animals were all about and 
you came through deep mud into the living-room. 
The pigs and fowls did not come in but were other- 
wise tree to go where they liked. The rooms were 
very low ; my hair, when I stood erect, just brushed 
the beams ; but the living-room or kitchen was 
spacious for so small a house, and had the wide old 




• 




h t . £ 01-1.1 n: 



CORNISH FARM-HOUSE 



To face page 114 



THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS 115 

open fireplace still common in this part of the country. 
Any other form of fireplace would not be suitable 
when the fuel consists of furze and turf. 

Here I had the feeling of being back in one of 
those primitive cattle-breeding establishments, or 
estancias as they are called, on the South American 
pampas, where every one, dogs and cats included, 




CORNISH FARM-HOUSES 



lived in the big smoke-blackened kitchen by day, and 
the fuel was dried stalks of Cardoon thistle and 
various other stout annuals, with dried cow-dung for 
peat, and greasy strong-smelling bones of dead horses, 
cows and sheep. It was like an illusion, so that I was 
continually on the point of addressing the children 
playing on the floor in Spanish, or in gaucho lingo, to 
name every dog " Pechicho " and call " Mees-mees " 
instead of " Pussy-pussy " to a cat. 



n6 THE LAND'S END 

By day I was out of doors, wet or fine, but in the 
evening — and it was when evenings were longest — 
I sat with the others and gazed into the cavernous 
fireplace and basked and shivered in the alternating 
bursts of heat and cold. As a rule, the round baking- 
pot was on its polished stone on the hearth, with 
smouldering turves built up round it and heaped on 
the flat lid. In some parts of Cornwall they have 
good peat, called " pudding turves," which makes 
a hot and comparatively lasting fire. In the Land's 
End district they have only the turf taken from the 
surface, which makes the poorest of all fires, but it 
has to serve. By and by the big home-made loaf 
would be done, and when taken out would fill the 
room with its wholesome smell — one is almost 
tempted to call it fragrance. But to make a blaze 
and get any warmth furze was burnt. On the floor 
at one side of the hearth there was always a huge pile 
of it ; the trouble was that it burnt up too quickly 
and took one person's whole time to keep the fire 
going. This onerous task was usually performed by 
the farmer's wife, who, after an exceedingly busy day 
beginning at five o'clock in the morning, appeared to 
regard it as a kind of rest or recreation. Standing 
between the hearth and pile she would pick up the 
top branch, and if too big with all its load of dry 
spines she would divide it, using her naked hands, 
and fling a portion on to the hearth. In a few 
moments the dry stuff would ignite and burn with 
a tremendous hissing and crackling, the flames spring- 
ing up to a height of seven or eight feet in the vast 



THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS 117 

hollow chimney. For a minute or two the whole big 
room would be almost too hot and lit up as by 
a flash of lightning. Then the roaring flames would 
sink and vanish, leaving nothing but a bed of grey 
ashes, jewelled with innumerable crimson and yellow 
sparks, rapidly diminishing. Then I would begin to 
think that " sitting by the fire " in this land was 
a mockery, that I was not warmed and made 
happy like a serpent in the sun, but was overcome 
from time to time by gusts of intolerable heat and 
light, with intervals of gloom that was almost dark- 
ness and bitter cold between. I should not have 
cared to spend the entire bitterly-cold winter of 
1906-7 with no better fuel, but for a time I liked it 
well enough ; it was a pleasure to feel the stirring to 
life of old instincts, to recover the associations which 
fire has for one that has lived in rude lands ; and 
then, too, the glorious effect of the blaze at its 
greatest was intensified by the cold and gloom that 
preceded and followed it. 

As I wished to know how they lived I had the 
ordinary fare and found it quite good enough for any 
healthy person : pork fattened on milk and home- 
cured ; milk (from the cow) and Cornish clotted 
cream, which is unrivalled ; sometimes a pasty, in 
which a little chopped-up meat is mixed with sliced 
turnip and onion and baked in a crust, and finally the 
thin Cornish broth with sliced swedes which give it 
a sweetish taste. Then there was the very excellent 
home-made bread, and saffron cake, on which the 
Cornish child is weaned and which he goes on eating 



n8 THE LAND'S END 

until the last day of his life. With every meal they 
drink tea. They are very good eaters : one day the 
farmer's wife told me that each one of her six little 
children consumed just double what I did. And the 
result of this abundance and of an open-air life in, 
that wet and windy country is that the people are as 
healthy and strong and long-lived as any in the world. 

The children are wonderful. You may go to 
village after village and look in vain for a sickly or 
unhappy face among them. It is true you do not find 
the very beautiful children one often sees in both 
England and Ireland, the angelic children with shin- 
ing golden hair, eyes of violet or pure forget-me-not 
blue and exquisite flesh tints, nor do you find children 
with so much charm. They are, generally speaking, 
more commonplace ; the wonder is in their uniform 
high state of well-being. One of the prettiest scenes 
I ever beheld was a procession on Empire Day, May 
24, of all the school children in Penzance. They 
were all, even to the poorest, prettily dressed, and 
those of a good number of schools, Catholic, Metho- 
dist and Anglican, had very beautiful distinctive cos- 
tumes. As I watched the mile-long procession going 
by in Market Jew Street, every face aglow with happy 
excitement, I began to search in the ranks for one 
that was thin and sad-looking or pale or anaemic, but 
failed to find such a one. 

We have been told by an English traveller in Japan 
that children are best off in that land where a mother 
is never seen to slap or heard to scold her child, and 
where a child is never heard to cry. Now a Japanese 



THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS 119 

visitor to England has informed us that it is not so, 
that mothers do sometimes slap or scold a child, and 
children do sometimes cry. I can say the same of 
West Cornwall, and nevertheless believe that com- 
pared with other parts of England it is a children's 
paradise. A common complaint made by English 
residents is that the children are not taught to know 
their place — that they do just what they like. 
" When my children want to go anywhere," a mother 
said to me, " they do not ask my permission : but 
they are very good — they always tell me where they 
are going. I do not forbid them because I know 
they would go just the same." The schoolmaster in 
a village I stayed at told me as an instance of the 
power the children have that one morning on passing 
a cottage he heard sounds of crying and voices in 
loud argument and went in to ascertain the cause. 
He found the man and his wife and their two little 
children — Billy the boy and Winnie the girl, aged 
nine — all in great distress. The man had received 
a letter from his cousin in Constantine to say that the 
village festival was about to take place and inviting 
him to go to him on a two or three days' visit and to 
take Billy. He wanted to go and so, of course, did 
Billy, and now Winnie had said that she must be taken 
too ! In vain they had reasoned with her, pointing 
out that she could not go because she had not been 
included in the invitation ; she simply said that if 
Billy went she would go, and from that position they 
could not move her. The result was that the visit to 
Constantine had to be abandoned ; the good man 



120 THE LAND'S END 

sadly informed the schoolmaster a day or two later 
that Winnie had refused to let them go without her ! 
The odd thing, my informant said, was that there was 
no attempt on the parents' part to put the child down. 
The children, he said, are masters of the situation in 
these parts : the way they lorded it over their parents 
had amazed him when he first came from a Midland 
district to live among them. 

But I must say for the little ones that they do not 
as a rule abuse their authority. They are so healthy, 
and have such happy and affectionate dispositions, 
that they do behave very well. Winnie was an 
exceptionally naughty little maid and required some 
such drastic method as that which Solomon advocated, 
but for the generality the system in favour is after all 
the one best suited to them. 




CHAPTER X 



AN IMPRESSION OF PENZANCE 



Value of first impressions — Market day in Penzance — Cornish cows 
— The main thoroughfare — Characteristics — Temperance in drink 
— A foreigner on English drinking habits — Irish intemperance — 
The craving for drink — False ideas — Wales — Methodism and 
temperance — Carew's testimony — Conclusion. 

PLACES are like faces — a first sight is almost 
invariably the one that tells you most. When 
the first sharp, clear impression has grown 
blurred, or is half forgotten or overlaid with sub- 
sequent impressions, we have as a rule lost more than 
we have gained : it is hardly too much to say in a 
majority of instances that the more familiar a place 
becomes to us the less well we know it. At all events 
we have ceased to know it in the same way ; we no 
longer vividly, consciously, see it in its distinctive 
character. 



122 THE LAND'S END 

Here it must be explained that by " place " several 
things are meant — the appearance of the buildings, if 
it be a town or village ; its scenery and physical con- 
ditions generally ; and, finally, its inhabitants, their 
physique, dress, speech and character. 

Now that I know Penzance fairly well, having 
visited it a dozen or twenty times, occasionally stay- 
ing a week or longer in it, I am glad to be able to go 
back to my very first impression, which, fortunately, 
I did not leave wholly to memory. 

The first visit was on a Tuesday, which is market 
day in Penzance, always the best day on which to visit 
a country town if one is interested in the people and 
their domestic animals. Although in midwinter, the 
day was exceptionally mild and very fine, and arriving 
early, I spent some hours in strolling about the 
streets, peeping into the churches, and visiting the 
public gardens, the sea-front and cattle-market. 
The town itself, despite its fine situation on Mount's 
Bay, with the famous castle on the island hill, opposite 
Marazion, on one hand and the bold coast scenery 
by Newlyn and Mousehole on the other, interested 
me as little as any country town I have seen. Streets 
narrow and others narrower still, some straight, some 
very crooked, with houses on either side, mostly 
modern, all more or less mean or commonplace in 
appearance. The market, too, was curiously mean, 
and the animals poor ; it was a surprise to see such 
cattle in a district which is chiefly dependent on dairy 
produce. The cows were small, mostly lean and all 
in an incredibly rough and dirty condition, their 



IMPRESSIONS OF PENZANCE 123 

haunches, and in many instances half their coats, 
covered with an old crust of indurated mud and 
dung. The farmers do nothing to improve their 
cattle and are not only satisfied to go on keeping 
these small beasts of no particular breed — a red and 
white animal which looks like a degenerated Jersey — 




MARKET JEW STREET 

but it is customary to allow them to breed a year too 
soon. 

This, however, is not a question to dogmatise about; 
one would certainly wish to see the beasts better cared 
for in the winter months and brought to market in a 
less filthy state, but I doubt that any improved breed 
would flourish in the conditions in which these 
animals exist in the small dairy farms on the stony 
mocrs in this rough unsheltered district. The cow of 
the Land's End country is, in some degree, a product 



i2 4 THE LAND'S END 

of the place and in harmony with its environment, like 
the Land's End fox and badger. 

At noon the market was over, but the town con- 
tinued full of people until long after dark, the main 
thoroughfare, Market Jew Street, and one or two 
streets adjoining, being thronged with farmer folk 
and people from the villages who had come in to sell 
their produce and do their shopping. Carriers' carts 
stood in rows by the side of the pavements, and as 
in other market towns each had brought in its little 
cargo of humanity, mostly women with sun-browned 
faces, all in that rusty respectable dowdy black dress 
which is universal in rural England and would make 
an ugly object of any woman in the world. Again, 
as is the custom in market towns, the thoroughfare 
was the place where the people congregated to meet 
and converse with their friends and relations. This 
meeting with friends appeared to be a principal object 
of a visit to Penzance on market day. It was a sort of 
social function, and the longer I remained in the street, 
sauntering about, watching the people and listening 
to endless dialogues, the more I was interested. Not 
only was this the healthiest-looking crowd I had ever 
seen in a town, without a sickly or degraded face in 
it, but it was undoubtedly the most cheerful, and at 
the same time the most sober. The liveliness of the 
crowd, its perpetual flow of hilarious talk, its meetings 
and greetings and handshakings, and its numerous 
little groups in eager good-humoured discussion, 
made me very watchful, but down to the end I was 
unable to detect the slightest sign of inebriety. It 



IMPRESSIONS OF PENZANCE 125 

was a new and curious experience to find myself in a 
considerable gathering of rustics who had succeeded 
in getting through their day away from home so 
pleasantly without the aid of intoxicants. 

Some of the town police I conversed with on the 
subject during the day assured me there was very 
little drinking going on ; and that on the last occasion 
of the great annual fair of Corpus Christi, which lasts 
two or three days, when the people of all the country 
round are gathered in Penzance and a good deal of 
merry-making goes on, they had not a single case of 
drunkenness. The policemen, abstainers themselves 
they informed me, believed the people were sober 
because they were mostly church and chapel goers 
and had been brought up to regard intemperance as 
a great defect in a man and a great sin. 

This explanation of the soberness of the Cornish 
people, especially in the west part, is, I found, the 
usual one : it is short and easy to carry about in the 
brain, and a policeman or any one you question on 
the point is as ready to supply you with it as he 
would be to give you a match to light your pipe. 
Religion may be one cause, but I imagine that another 
and a much more important one is to be traced in the 
character of this people. 

I here recall a striking explanation of the drinking 
habit in England given me by an independent witness 
and a very keen observer. He was an Argentine of 
an old native family. I first knew him as a young 
student ; he rose afterwards to a very high place in 
the government of his country, and a few years ago, 



126 THE LAND'S END 

while on a visit to England, he looked me up and we 
renewed our old friendship. 

His idea about drinking in England was that it was 
indulged in to remedy a defect in us, a certain slow- 
ness or dullness of thought or feeling from which we 
desired at times to escape. He gave the following 
illustration. Two British workmen, old friends, meet 
by chance after a long interval and clasp hands 
delightedly and each asks the other how he is. One 
says " Just so so " or " Pretty well," the other says 
" Mustn't grumble." They appear, then, to have 
got to the end of their powers of speech, yet are con- 
scious that there is more to be said if they are ever 
to get back into the old comfortable intimacy. Sud- 
denly one has an inspiration and proposes a drink. 
The other agrees with a sense of relief, and they 
incontinently repair to the nearest public, where, 
after a glass or two, what they desired and tried to 
get but could not is at once theirs : their tongues 
are loosed, they laugh in pure joy at their new-found 
freedom and ability to express themselves ; they talk 
of their work, their families, of a hundred things 
they had forgotten but remember now, and are glad 
to feel in sympathy with each other. 

Now, he continued, we of another race and dispo- 
sition in our country when we meet an old friend, 
although it may not be very long since we last saw 
him, feel no such restraint, but at once the joy of 
meeting him sets us off. The pleasure is stimulus 
enough of itself ; it sends the blood spinning through 
our brains, and we are, in fact, almost intoxicated by 



IMPRESSIONS OF PENZANCE 127 

it. To take alcohol is unnecessary, and would, in- 
deed, be very foolish. 

So far my Argentine friend, and whether he was 
right or wrong it struck me at Penzance that the 
naturally lively disposition of Cornishmen, their 
quick feeling and responsiveness, was the chief cause 
of their temperance in drink. This made it easy for 
them to practise temperance ; it made it possible for 
friend to meet friend and spend the day without an 
artificial aid to cheerfulness. 

It is true that the Irish, racially related to the 
Cornish and resembling them in disposition, are not 
a sober people ; on this point I will only venture to 
suggest that their love of whisky and ether may 
not result from the same cause as the Anglo-Saxon's 
love of drink. Probably their misery has got a great 
deal to do with it, for just as whisky or beer will 
unfreeze the currents of the soul in two stolid English 
friends and set them flowing merrily, so in men of all 
races will alcohol lift them above themselves and give 
them a brief happiness. 

It may seem odd to quote the Rev. R. J. Campbell 
in this connection, but I find in a recent pronounce- 
ment of his a curiously apposite remark about 
drunkenness. " The man," he says, " who got dead 
drunk last night did so because of the inspiration in 
him to break through the barriers of his limitations, 
to express himself and realize the more abundant 
life." We need not follow him any further in his 
quaint contention that sin is, after all, nothing but a 
spasmodic effort of the sinner to reach to or capture 



128 THE LAND'S END 

higher things — a "quest of God" as he curiously 
puts it. It is nothing but a prolonged and somewhat 
shrill echo of a wiser or a saner man's thoughts. 
" The sway of alcohol over mankind," says Professor 
William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, 
" is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the 
mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed 
to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the 
sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and 
says, No ; drunkenness expands, unites and says, 
Yes. ... It brings its votary from the chill peri- 
phery of things to the radiant core. It makes him 
for the moment one with truth ... it is part of the 
deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and 
gleams of something that we immediately recognise 
as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us 
only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its 
totality is so degrading a poisoning." 

Mr. Campbell's striver after the higher life who 
got dead drunk last night is brother to the savage. 
It is stated by no less an authority on the drink ques- 
tion than Dr. Archdall Reid that there is in man a 
passion, an instinct, for alcohol, and that the savage 
has a craving for drink. There is no such craving. 
The natural happiness of the savage, as I know him, 
is in hunting and fighting ; and in the intervals of 
those stirring pursuits he has a somewhat dull, 
lethargic existence. Alcohol produces the state of 
mind he is in when occupied with the chase or in 
raiding and fighting. It is a joyful excitement, a 
short cut to happiness and glory which he will take 



IMPRESSIONS OF PENZANCE 129 

at every opportunity. They will even sell their 
weapons and the skins that cover them for a little of 
this happiness ; but when there is no more of it to 
be had they return to their normal life, and think no 
more about it unless the poison has permanently 
or very seriously injured them. One effect on the 
poisoned man, savage or civilised, is that "craving", 
or mad thirst, with which, Dr. Reid imagines, Nature 
has cursed her human children. 

We have now got a good distance away from the 
subject we started with ; but I have no intention of 
returning to Penzance. That town interested me 
solely as a place where Cornishmen may be seen and 
studied. To go back a little further in time to my 
first impressions of Cornwall, I was struck, as most 
persons are on a first visit, with its unlikeness to other 
parts of England. You find the unlikeness, not 
only in the aspect of the country, but in the people 
too ; you would hardly feel that you had gone so far 
from the England you know if you had crossed the 
Atlantic. The differences are many and great, but in 
this chapter I am concerned with only one — the 
greater temperance of the people : indeed, my im- 
pression of Penzance was given mainly to serve as an 
introduction to this subject. It is a very important 
one. Our judges and magistrates are always telling" 
us that most of the crimes committed in this country 
are due to drink. The case of Cornwall certainly 
favours that view : it is, if the statistics are accepted as 
showing the true state of things, the most sober and has 
the cleanest record in the land. The Devonians are 



130 THE LAND'S END 

not a vicious people ; they compare well enough with 
most counties, and they are next-door neighbours to 
the Cornish ; yet the indictable offences in Devon are 
about double per thousand of the population to those 
of Cornwall. What is the reason of this ? Why are 
the Cornish more temperate than others ? 

I am sorry I ever wasted an hour over a book on 
Cornwall with the idea that it would be helpful to me. 
The time would have been more profitably spent if I 
had stood with my hands in my pockets watching a 
sparrow carry up straws to its nesting-hole under the 
eaves ; or, better still, if I had talked to a child or an 
old man in some village street. To read is to imbibe 
false ideas, and in the end, if you are capable of 
observing for yourself and care anything about the 
matter, you are put to the trouble of ridding yourself 
of them. 

When the Penzance policemen — abstainers and reli- 
gious men themselves — gave me a reason for the 
people's soberness they were telling me what they had 
been taught, and I accepted it as probably true. 1 too 
had read that statement and here was a confirmation 
of it ! It is a great satisfaction, a relief, to have our 
problems solved for us. Blessings on the man who 
runs out before us to remove some obstacle from the 
path ! 

But the relief was not for long: doubts began to 
assail me. What the good policemen had said was 
what the Methodists have been saying in their writ- 
ings these hundred years or longer : they are saying 
it now, all the time, and believe it because it flatters 



IMPRESSIONS OF PENZANCE 131 

them, and poor weak humanity is ever credulous of a 
flattering falsehood. 

One day, a few miles from Penzance, I met a young 
coastguardsman and had a nice long talk with him, in 
the course of which he gave me his impression of the 
country. For he was not a native and had not long 
been in Cornwall ; he came from South Wales where 
he had been stationed two or three years. The people 
of that place — I will not mention the locality — were, 
he said, horrible to live with, degraded and brutish 
beyond what he could have imagined possible in any 
civilised country. They were drunkards, fighters, 
dreadfully profane, and as to lechery — called immoral- 
ity in the journals and blue-books — no woman could 
go out after dark, or by day into any lonely place, 
without danger of assault. The change to West 
Cornwall was so great that for several weeks he could 
not realise it ; he could not believe that the people 
were all sober and decent and friendly in disposition 
as he had been assured. When he spied a man 
coming along the road his impulse was to lower his 
eyes or turn his face away to avoid seeing a brutalised 
countenance. He always expected to hear some ob- 
scene expression or a torrent of profanity from every 
stranger he met. Even now, after some months in 
this new clean land, he had not grown quite accus- 
tomed to regard every one, stranger or not, as a being 
just like himself, one he could freely address and feel 
sure of receiving friendly pleasant words in return. 

It was interesting to hear the coastguardsman's 
story because of his feelings in the matter and what 



132 THE LAND'S END 

the change to Cornwall meant to him. That he was 
right in his facts we know. We know, for instance, 
that just as Cornwall is the cleanest county, so 
some of the Welsh counties — especially in the coal- 
mining districts — are the foulest. Yet the Welsh 
are Celts too and Methodists of a hundred and 
fifty years standing ! They are, in fact, the truer 
Methodists if we consider what that creed is and that 
its most essential point is that there can be no salva- 
tion without a sudden conversion, with or without 
the accompaniment of groanings, shriekings, and 
other manifestations of the kind. But what are the 
facts of the case as to the condition of Cornwall, 
with regard to drunkenness, before its conversion to 
Methodism ? They are not so easily got as one may 
think. There is plenty of material, and any one 
with a preconceived opinion on the question would 
doubtless find something to confirm him in it. I 
had no opinion, and my sole desire was to find out 
the truth. My first superficial study of the question 
made me a believer in the claim made by the Meth- 
odists, but it did not bear a closer investigation. 
What I found was that when tin-mining was in a 
highly prosperous state and the population of the 
mining centres vastly greater than it is now there was 
a good deal of intemperance among the miners ; but 
there is nothing to show that they were as degraded 
as the Welsh of to-day. It is also indisputable that 
Wesley's preaching had a profound effect on the tin- 
miners. That is the most that can be said. That 
the Methodism invented after Wesley's death and 



IMPRESSIONS OF PENZANCE 133 

imposed on his followers in his name — the name of 
one who abhorred Dissent — is the cause of the tem- 
perance of the Cornish people generally there is no 
evidence to show, and no reason to believe. On the 
contrary there is very good reason for disbelief. 

The Cornish people are incomparably better off 
now, so far as material comforts go, than they were in 
the last half of the sixteenth century, when Richard 
Carew wrote his Survey of Cornwall ; but there have 
been no really great, no radical changes — no trans- 
formations, as in so many other parts of Britain. 
The life of to-day is very much like the old life, and 
the people now are like their forefathers of three 
centuries ago as described by Carew. He pointed 
out that the tin-mines were a great evil — the curse of 
Cornwall, since it was impossible for the miners to 
escape the abominable temptations to drink which 
were thrust in their way. Every second house was a 
drinking-place, into which the poor wretches were 
enticed to waste their earnings, with the result that 
their families were in a chronic state of want. But 
the rural population were in a very different case ; 
those who worked on the land were indeed poor, 
fared coarsely, dressed meanly and wore no shoes, 
but they were sober and industrious and lived in 
decent homes, and their wives and children were 
properly fed and clothed ; so that in the end they 
were far better off and happier than the workers in 
the mines. 

So we arrive at the conclusion that the Cornish 
people are not, and never have been, intemperate 



i 3 4 THE LAND'S END 

generally ; for one reason, because they are of a 
singularly happy disposition, lively and sociable, with 
a very intense love of their families and homes ; and, 
secondly, because of the idyllic conditions in which 
they exist, and always have existed, in a country 
thinly populated, without big towns, with the 
healthiest, most equable and genial climate in 
Britain ; and, best of all, isolated, outside of and 
remote from civilisation with its feverish restlessness, 
vices and dreadful problems. 




CHAPTER XI 
MANNERS AND MORALS 

Carew's Survey of Cornwall — Books on Cornwall — Excessive praise 
and dispraise — Saxon and Celt — Charge of insincerity — " One- 
and-all " spirit — Dishonesty — Untruthfulness — An Englishman's 
view of the Welsh — The question of immorality — Cruelty to animals 
— Offences unpunished — Cornish civilisation a "veneer" — Wreck- 
ing and what it means — Sunday observance — Cornish and English 
consistency — Englishmen who understand. 

" A FTER having marched over the land, and 

y\ waded through the sea, to describe all the 

creatures therein, insensible and sensible, the 

course of method summoneth me to discourse of 

the reasonable, to wit, the inhabitants." 

Thus said Richard Carew in his Survey of Cornwall^ 
written at the end of the sixteenth century. I have 
no course of method, nor any order in which to 
record these impressions of rocks and waters and 
birds and flowers, or any other thing, insensible or 

i35 



r 3 6 THE LAND'S END 

sensible ; but now, after having written one entire 
long chapter on the soberness of the Cornish people, 
explaining the causes, as I conceive them, of this 
peculiar state, I think it may be just as well to go on 
about the reasonable, to wit the inhabitants, and 
endeavour to get a little nearer to a proper under- 
standing of them. And here I must modify what I 
said in my haste about the worthlessness (to me) 
of all books on Cornwall, protesting that my time 
would have been better spent in listening to the chir- 
ruping of a cock sparrow than in reading them. 
Carew's book is a notable exception, pleasant and 
profitable to read after three centuries, and, if we 
exclude living authors, it may be described as the one 
very good book ever written by a Cornishman. 

Having said so much it strikes me as an odd fact 
that the boast Carew made about his important and 
long-living book — that it was his very own, or, to use 
his more picturesque expression, that he gathered the 
sticks for the building of his poor nest — I, too, can 
make of this unimportant work which may not have 
more years of life than the Survey has had centuries. 

For impressions of nature one goes to nature — the 
visible world which lies open before us ; but when it 
comes to that other nature of the human heart, half- 
hidden in clouds and mist and half-revealed in gleams 
of the sun, one modestly looks to others for guidance 
and to the books which have been written in the 
past. And of books there are plenty — histories, 
topographies, guides, hand-books, tours, travels, itin- 
eraries, journeys and journals, wherein are many useful 



MANNERS AND MORALS 137 

facts originally collected very long ago and carried on 
from book to book— facts about the pilchard fishery, 
tin and tin - mining, geology and natural history, 
Cornish crosses and cromlechs with other antiquities ; 
also legends of saints and giants and the happenings 
of a thousand years ago. But about the reasonable, 
to wit the inhabitants, next to nothing, and that very 
little as a rule misleading. It is mostly of a flattering 
description. 

It is indeed curious to note that while those who 
have written on the Cornish people almost invariably 
say the pleasantest things about them, the English, or 
Anglo-Saxons, who live among them, the strangers 
who reside permanently or for long periods within 
their gates, have a very different opinion. The 
praise and the dispraise to my mind are equally far 
from the truth ; moreover, it is not difficult to dis- 
cover the reason of such widely divergent opinions. 
Those who visit the land to write a book about it, or 
for some other purpose, but do not remain long 
enough to know anything properly, are charmed and 
misled by the exceedingly friendly and pleasant de- 
meanour towards strangers which is almost universal, 
seeing in it only the outward expression of divers 
delightful qualities. Those who live with the people, 
if they happen to be Saxons, discover that the friend- 
liness is a manner, that when you penetrate beneath it 
you come upon a character wholly un-Saxon, there- 
fore of a wrong description or an inferior quality. 
For it is a fact that the Englishman is endowed with 
a very great idea of himself, of the absolute Tightness 



138 THE LAND'S END 

of his philosophy of life, his instincts, prepossessions, 
and the peculiar shape and shade of his morality. 
He is, so to speak, his own standard, and measures 
everybody from China to Peru by it, and those who 
fall short of it, who have a somewhat different code 
or ideal, are of the meaner sort of men which one 
expects to find outside of these islands. It is un- 
doubtedly a noble state of mind, befitting a world- 
conquering people, and has served to make us 
respected, feared and even disliked in other coun- 
tries, but some small disadvantages and some friction 
result from it at home, and one is that the lord of 
human kind residing among inferior Celts finds 
himself out of harmony with the people about him. 
He is not as a rule quick, but after a few months or 
years in a place he begins to find his neighbours out, 
and they on their side are not insensible of the change 
in his regard. He sees that they have faults and 
vices which being unlike those of the English he 
finds it hard to tolerate. Not only does he disapprove 
of them on this account but he resents having been 
taken in. " You are charmed with this people, you tell 
me ! Wait till you have lived years with them as I 
have done and know them as I do, then give me your 
opinion," they are accustomed to say in their bitterness 
— the feeling which cannot but make a man unjust. 

It is not easy or not pleasant to descend to particu- 
lars, but having gone so far as to state the question it 
would hardly be fair not to go further, although by 
so doing I shall most probably incur the displeasure 
of both sides. 



MANNERS AND MORALS 139 

A common charge against the Cornish is a want of 
solidity or stability of character. You cannot rely on 
them. You are constantly deceived by their manner : 
they are the readiest of any people on earth to fall 
in with your views and do exactly what you want. 
But they don't do it. You may waste years or indeed 
your whole life in striving to make them see things in 
your better way, and give them every instruction and 
make them understand (for they are not stupid) how 
much more may be done by following an improved 
method, and you will always be brought back to the 
same old We don't belong to do it that way, and after a 
hundred or a thousand trials you give it up in despair. 
Or you may take your defeat philosophically (with a 
little added wormwood) and say that although they 
are not stupid, their intelligence, like that of the 
lower animals, is non-progressive. 

Then as to the one-and-all spirit. This, I am 
assured on all hands, is the veriest fiction, or at all 
events it is quite a different thing from what it is 
usually supposed to be. The members of each little 
community are as a fact more unfriendly and spiteful 
towards one another than is the case in an English 
village : they are one only when they make a com- 
bined attack on some person who has been so unfor- 
tunate as to offend everybody at the same time. So 
envious are they that every one hates to see any bene- 
fit or gift bestowed on another. You must treat all 
alike ; you may not give a hundred of coals to the 
poorest, most suffering old woman without exciting 
general ill-will, unless you are prepared to give as 



i 4 o THE LAND'S END 

much to every other old woman in the parish. They 
would rather the old creature should be left to shiver 
in a fireless room. Nor must you speak in praise of 
another : do not say to Mrs. Trevenna, what a nice, 
or what a well-behaved, or pretty, or attractive child 
that is of your sister or friend or neighbour, Mrs. 
Trevasgis, if you do not want to set the Trevenna 
tongue wagging against both you and the Trevasgis 
woman. 

These little uncharitablenesses — to describe them 
all in one word — are universal in man or woman, 
perhaps in both, and being part of our nature they 
probably have their uses : if they strike us more in 
the Cornish than in our own people it is because of 
the difference of temperament or disposition — because 
their feelings, good or bad, are more readily excited 
and are expressed with less restraint. 

That they are not truthful and not honest is another 
count in the long indictment. With regard to honesty 
it is one I always hear with surprise ; for can it be 
said that we are as a people honest ? Consider the 
one matter of our food and drink — the amount of 
legislation we have found necessary on the subject, 
the cost to the country of maintaining a vast army 
of inspectors and analysts to prevent us from poison- 
ing each other for the sake of a small extra gain ! 
Would any one in England give me for love or money 
a glass of milk or beer, or a slice of bread and butter, 
which would not seriously injure my health but for 
the fear of the law ? And after all we have done to 
protect ourselves we are assured every day by the 



MANNERS AND MORALS 141 

experts that we are living in a fool's paradise seeing 
that dishonesty is so ingrained in us that it will always 
find out a way to defeat our best efforts. 

This charge may then be dropped — for the present 
at all events. When our moral condition has been 
properly examined and reported on by travellers and 
missionaries from Thibet or some undiscovered country 
on the other side of the Mountains of the Moon we 
may be in a position to affirm that Cornwall is not as 
honest as, say, Middlesex. 

But if honesty is or ought to be a painful subject, 
perhaps in discussing the question of truthfulness 
we shall be able to make out a better case and recover 
our self-esteem. Here we have it as it is stated by 
one of my correspondents : " However bad the 
English commercial morality may be, the average 
Englishman's word still stands for something. When 
he lies he does so deliberately for some important 
purpose. Some other races, including the Celts, 
appear to have a different perception of truth, and to 
lie, as children do, readily and gracefully, because 
lies and exaggerations are more interesting and agree- 
able than plain truth. A difference of temperament : 
the Englishman may be better or worse, but he knows 
where he is and resents being fooled." 

This reminds me of the experience of a young 
friend of mine, a pure Englishman, exceptionally 
intelligent, and so sympathetic and adaptive that he 
is happy with all sorts of people and they with him. 
From boyhood he has lived in Wales, a somewhat 
rambling life, in towns, villages and iarm- houses, 



i 4 2 THE LAND'S END 

and his playmates, fellow-students and companions 
have been natives. Yet he assures me that he has 
never been able to feel himself one of them, and 
never been able to see anything eye to eye with even 
his most intimate and dearest friends of that race. 
It all seems to come to an ineradicable difference of 
mind in the two races. There is no better and no 
worse, and the only quarrel is when any one, Saxon or 
Celt, is offended at another's inability to see eye to 
eye with him, regarding it as a bad habit which ought 
to be overcome, or a sheer piece of perversity on his 
part. 

Then we have the complicated question of morality, 
or rather of "immorality," by which some journalists, 
authors and compilers of blue-books mean sexual 
intercourse unsanctified by marriage. Norden, who 
wrote nigh on three centuries before the nice modern 
mind invented a new meaning for an old word, 
described it as the " sweet synn " which was regarded 
as venial in Cornwall. But Norden spoke of the 
gentry ; the manners and morals of what he described 
as the " baser sort of men," including rustics, miners, 
mechanics, farmers and yeomen, did not interest his 
lofty mind. But the sweet sin was also common 
among Norden's " baser sort oi men," and exists 
to-day as it did in the past, and as it exists in the 
Principality, and perhaps in Ireland, where the power 
and vigilance of the priests are now able to keep it 
dark. It is really not so much a vice as a custom of 
the country, perhaps of the race, seeing that the illicit 
intercourse usually ends in marriage. It has been 



MANNERS AND MORALS 



H3 



said that in Cornwall matrimony is the result of 
maternity. For it must be borne in mind that 1 am 
speaking only of Cornwall. We have seen in the 




A L.C 



MOUSEHOLE 



last chapter how it is in Wales, in some of the mining 
districts ; but these bestial developments are not 
known and have probably never existed in the 
duchy. It is true that some poor women are left to 



i 4 4 THE LAND'S END 

bear their burden alone, and that their frail sisters who 
have had better fortune are as ready as others to 
persecute them, but the proportion of these un- 
happy ones is really less than in very many English 

villages. 
© 

It is of the villages and small towns 1 speak : the 
towns are mostly very small ; but as population in- 
creases with the revival of the mining industry (the 
curse of the country " from ancientie ") the extra- 
ordinary liberty which young women are allowed, or 
have taken for themselves, and their pleasant ways 
with men may result in a troublesome problem in 
the larger centres. 

It is said of the Cornish, as it has been said of the 
Irish and of Celtic people generally, that they are 
cruel. I doubt if they are more cruel than others if 
we restrict the word to its proper meaning — the 
infliction of pain for the pleasure of it ; but there is 
a great deal of barbarity of the kind one sees in 
Spanish and Italian countries which results from 
temper. The Cornish, like the Spanish, are passion- 
ate and when anything goes wrong they are apt to 
wreak their fury on the poor unresisting beast — cow, 
calf, horse, donkey or sheep. I have witnessed many 
shocking acts of this kind which it would be too 
painful to me to have to describe, and in discussing 
this subject with others, some of them Cornishmen 
who naturally love their people and are anxious to see 
them in the most favourable light, they have confessed 
to me that this kind of brutality is very common ; that 
it is the greatest blot on the Cornishman's character and 



MANNERS AND MORALS 145 

a constant cause of pain to persons of a humane dis- 
position. What to me makes it peculiarly painful is 
the knowledge that the man I have witnessed horribly 
ill-treating some patient dumb beast, and hated and 
wished that I had had the power to annihilate him — 
this very man, his fit of fury over, would prove him- 
self a genuine Cornishman, a very pleasant fellow, 
temperate, religious, hospitable, a good husband, 
devoted to his children. 

Celtic cruelty, Tennyson said, was due to want 
of imagination. He was speaking of the Irish, who 
are not supposed to be without that faculty. Whether 
or not the Cornish have it is another question, but it 
may be that Celtic cruelty, like the Spanish, is due 
rather to a drop of black blood in the heart — an ancient 
latent ferocity which comes out in moments of passion. 

The fact that prosecutions for cruelty to animals 
are so rare — one case, I should say, in about every 
five thousand getting into court — reminds me here 
of another charge brought against the Cornish by 
the strangers within their gates. If Cornwall, the 
critics say, is able to show the cleanest record in 
England it is because the law-breakers are not treated 
as in other counties. Offences are winked at or over- 
looked by the police in many instances, and when a 
prosecution takes place magistrates will not convict 
if they can possibly help it. Not only are they too 
tolerant and hate to hurt one of their own people, 
but they think of themselves, of their own material 
interests, and are anxious above all things that their 
county should maintain its nice reputation. 



146 THE LAND'S END 

Something more will have to be said on the subject 
of cruelty to animals in another chapter about wild 
birds during severe weather. At present, to conclude 
this chapter, we have to consider another matter which 
is that of the gravest charge of all and is indicated in 
the following words spoken to me by a professional 
man, a resident in West Cornwall. " I have lived 
and worked for twenty years among this people and 
have long lost the last vestige of respect and affection 
I once had for them. They are at heart what their 
forefathers were ; their religion, softer manners and 
apparent friendliness to strangers, is all on the surface 
— a veneer. The old barbarism lives and burns under 
it, and if it were not for the watch kept on them and 
the altered conditions generally they would go gladly 
back to the ancient trade of wrecking." 

This spontaneous outburst on the part of a person 
occupying an important position in the community 
made me curious to know more about the man him- 
self. He was in a sense a good man, a generous 
giver according to his means, and as he gave secretly 
even those who hated him (because they knew, I 
imagine, that he despised and hated them) were never 
unwilling to go to him for help when they required 
it. But he was by nature an alien, one of those 
downright uncompromising Saxons who cannot get 
on with those of a different and in some things 
antagonistic race. He had tried his best to bridge 
the gulf over. His ambition had been to make him- 
self the most loved man in the place and naturally his 
signal failure had embittered him. 



MANNERS AND MORALS 147 

But what about the charge ? Was there a particle 
of truth in it? And, finally, what is meant by 
wrecking? 

I take it that two distinct things are meant — one a 
very black crime indeed, the other nothing worse than 
a disregard of regulations and petty pilfering. With 
regard to the first it is believed from certain stories 
and traditions which have come down to us, the 
origin of which is lost in the mists of antiquity, that 
the natives of the dangerous parts of the coast made 
it a custom to lure vessels on to the rocks to their 
destruction by displaying false lights. This may be 
true : we know that the various races and tribes com- 
posing the nation — Celts and Saxons, Danes and 
Normans — vied with each other in every form of 
atrocity and of cruelty ; but no instance of the crime 
in question can be authenticated as having taken 
place in recent times. Nevertheless the belief is 
cherished and kept alive in books, mainly religious 
tales and novels, that this frightful custom continued 
down to the middle of the eighteenth century when 
Wesley appeared to convert the Cornish people from 
their vicious ways and all kinds of wickedness, in- 
cluding that of deliberately wrecking vessels and 
murdering the unhappy wretches who succeeded in 
escaping from the fury of the waves. As the books 
containing these veracious statements, so flattering to 
the Cornish, are exceedingly popular in the Duchy 
and nowhere out of it, the Cornish people are them- 
selves responsible for keeping these fables alive. 

As for the other lesser crime or offence, I fancy 



148 THE LAND'S END 

that it is not one an Englishman can look on as a 
very serious matter. 

I was one day discussing the Sunday observance 
question with an English clergyman whose parish lies 
on the Cornish coast, and related the following incident 
to him. I was lodging with an intelligent and well-to- 
do artisan and his wife in a Somerset village when one 
Sunday morning, the weather being very fine, my 
host, finding that I was not going to church, asked me 
if I would take a walk with him as he wished to show 
me some nice spots in the neighbouring woods and 
copses where he was accustomed to go. The woods 
were certainly very beautiful, with green open spaces 
and a fine stream where we watched the trout and 
saw a kingfisher flash by. We said it was not a bad 
place to spend a Sunday morning in and then fell into 
a long talk about Sunday observance, and the fact 
that village people, the men especially, had lost the 
habit of going to church but had discovered no way 
of spending the day pleasantly or profitably. I 
thought that outdoor games ought to be encouraged 
as it was plainly beneficial both to mind and body and 
saved them from tedium and the temptations to drink 
and smoke more than was good for them. I thought 
too that when the parson of the parish took this line 
the effect was entirely good ; it taught them to look 
on him as more human and one of themselves and 
capable of putting himself in their place. 

My companion looked grave and shook his head 
at this, and when 1 told him that I knew clergymen 
who were as good men as could be found in the land 



MANNERS AND MORALS 149 

who agreed with my view, and were the promoters of 
Sunday games in their parishes, he answered that if 
a thing were wrong, even ministers of the Gospel 
could not make it right. He was in the middle of 
his argument when we came out from a big copse 
into a large open space, and created a panic in a 
multitude of rabbits feeding there. Away they 
scuttled in every direction — hundreds of rabbits, old 
and half-grown young. Going a little further we 
noticed our small spaniel sniffing at a burrow. 
" He's a clever little dog," said my companion ; " he 
always lets me know when a rabbit is not too far 
down." With that he got down on the turf, and 
thrusting his arm in to the shoulder, quickly pulled 
out a young rabbit, which, after snapping its neck, 
he thrust into his large coat-tail pocket. Putting his 
arm down again he pulled out a second one, then a 
third, and having snapped their necks and pocketed 
them, he got up and we resumed our walk and our 
discussion. "No, no," he said. "I'm not a religious 
man, and don't go to church as a rule, but I draw the 
line at playing games on a Sunday." 

Then he came to a stop beside a close thicket of 
brambles and thorn, and began pulling the rabbits 
out of his pocket. " After all I don't want them, 
and they are a nuisance to carry," he said, and with 
that he threw them into the thicket. 

That was my story. 

"We are just as consistent here," said the Cornish 
clergyman. " The people are religious and strict 
Sabbatarians ; they go regularly to church or chapel, 



ISO THE LAND'S END 

but if a vessel in distress is in sight, and there is a 
chance of its going on the rocks, they make an 
exception ; they will pace the cliffs all day long in the 
hope of a bit of flotsam coming in their way." 

They may appear equally inconsistent— the Somer- 
set man and the Cornishman — but can we say that one 
is morally worse than the other ? The case of the 
good artisan who drew the line at cricket on Sunday 
is not a singular one : one doubts if there is a 
peasant in England, however truly religious a man 
he may be, who would not pick up a rabbit or hare if 
he got the chance on any day of the week. They do 
not believe it is wrong, consequently it does not hurt 
their conscience, and the only fear they have is to be 
found out. And so with the Cornishman ; it is 
ingrained in him, and is like an inherited knowledge, 
that if the Power that rules the winds and waves, 
and who holds the lives of all men in the hollow of 
his hand, sends a ship upon the rocks, it is because 
he thinks proper to destroy that ship and incidentally 
to scatter gifts among his people living on the coast. 
Shall they refuse to take any good thing he chooses 
to send them ? If their minister tells them it is 
wrong it is because he does not know the rights of 
it. Their fathers did it, and their forefathers, for 
generations back and were no worse for it. It 
would indeed be strange if they did not resent as an 
injustice, an interference with their natural rights, 
that so strict a watch is kept on them, and that they 
are forbidden to take anything the waves may cast up 
in their way. 



MANNERS AND MORALS 151 

Quite recently we had some rather startling mani- 
festations of this feeling and one amusing instance 
may be given. Just after a big ship had come to 
grief on the rocks, at the most dangerous point on 
the coast, another ship was in great peril near the 
same spot ; fortunately, towards evening, the weather 
moderated a little and it began to look as if there 
was not going to be a second disaster just then. My 
informant was standing on the shore with some of 
the fishermen of the place looking at the sea. The 
sky was clearing and the sun, near the horizon, came 
forth a great globe of red fire and threw its light 
over the tumultuous waters. Then all at once one of 
the men burst out in a storm of execration, and 
cursed the sun and wind and sea and pretty well the 
whole universe. For it seemed so hard just when 
things were looking so well that the sun should shine 
and the wind begin to fall and the sea moderate ! 
My informant asked him indignantly how he, a 
Christian man, could entertain such feelings and 
how he dared to express them. He answered by 
putting out his right arm and baring it to the elbow, 
then, feeling the muscles with the fingers of the left 
hand, he said with a somewhat rueful expression, " It's 
in the bone, and we cant help it ! " 

Yet this very man had been foremost in the work 
of rescuing the people in the ship that had gone on 
the rocks. 

My informant happens to be one of the English- 
men in Cornwall who do not experience that antipathy 
or sense of separation in mind from the people they 



1 52 THE LAND'S END 

live with, and are not looked at as foreigners. I 
have met with several such who have very pleasant 
relations with their neighbours, and can love and are 
loved by them, and are almost able to forget that they 
are not natives. But, unless I am mistaken, in such 
cases the stranger is not wholly a stranger ; in other 
words he is partly of the same race, therefore able to 
sympathise and to identify himself with them. And 
it may be due to the Celtic element in me that I feel 
very much at home with the people. A Dumnonian, 
if not a " swart Belerian," with an admixture of Irish 
blood, I feel myself related to them and therefore do 
not think they can justly resent my having described 
them as I have found them without the usual pretty 
little lying flatteries. Your relations are privileged 
critics. Moreover, if I love them they cannot, 
according to their own saying, have any but a kindly 
feeling for me. " Karenza whelas Karenza " is all the 
Cornish I know. 







s^v 






CHAPTER XII 
CORNISH HUMOUR 

Native humour — Deceptive signs — Adventures in search of humour — 
Irish and Cornish expression — A traveller in a stony country — 
The stone-digger — Taking you literally — The danger of using 
figures of speech — Anecdotes — The Cornish funny man — English 
and Cornish humour — Unconscious humour of two kinds — A 
woman preacher — A story of Brett the artist — Examples of un- 
conscious humour — A local preacher — An old man and a parrot — 
Children's humour — Guize-dancing. 

IT is permissible to a writer once in a lifetime to 
illustrate his work by an allusion to that cele- 
brated " Chapter on Snakes," in an island in 
which these reptiles are not found. But I am not 
saying that there is no humour in Cornwall. There 
may be such a thing ; but if you meet with it you 
will find that it is of the ordinary sort, only of an 
inferior quality, and that there is very little. What 
I can say is there is no Cornish humour, no humour 
of the soil and race, as there is an Irish and a Scotch 

»53 



154 THE LAND'S END 

humour, and even as there is an English humour, 
which may be of a poor description in comparison 
with the Hibernian, but is humour nevertheless, 
native and local, and not confined to Dorset and 
Warwickshire but to be met with in every county 
from the Tamar to the Tweed. 

This came as a great surprise to me since I had 
often read in books and articles about the county that 
the Cornish are a humorous folk, and those who 
have been there and profess to know the people say 
that it is so. Their humour, like their imagination 
(for they are also credited with that faculty), is some- 
times vaguely described as of the Celtic sort. My 
surprise was all the greater when I came and saw the 
people and received confirmation, as I imagined, 
through the sense of sight of all I had been told. 
They looked it, yet were without it ; the signs, 
" gracious as rainbows," deceived me (as they had 
doubtless deceived others), but only for a season ; 
they were the outward marks of quite other pleasing 
qualities with which we are not now concerned. 
I looked for humour and met with some amusing 
adventures in my search for that rare, elusive quality. 
Walking to a village one day I fell in with a man 
who had, like many a West Cornishman, a strikingly 
Irish countenance, also an Irish voice and flow of 
spirits. Hearing where I was going he at once un- 
dertook to show me the nearest way. It would, he 
asserted, save me a good mile : his way proved in the 
end two miles further than the one I had chosen, but 
it led him near to his own cottage and he wanted 



CORNISH HUMOUR 155 

badly to shorten the way with talk — that was all. 
I did not mind, because I wished to listen to him, 
thinking that I had at length got hold of the right 
person, one who would give me a taste of the genuine 
native humour. Not a bit of it ! He talked freely 
of many things — his native place, his family, his 
neighbours, the good and the bad in them, his past 
life and labours, future prospects and much more — 
a long talk which an Irishman would have enlivened 
with many flashes of quaint humour, but there was 
not the faintest trace of such a quality in it. 

Later in the same day I walked by a footpath which 
led me through what is called the " town-place " of a 
small farm-house. Here I found two men engaged 
in an animated discussion, and one, in ragged clothes 
with a pitchfork in his hand, was the very type of a 
wild Irishman ; in all Connemara you would not find 
a more perfect specimen — rags, old battered hat, 
twinkling grey-blue Irish eyes, a shock of the most 
fiery carroty red hair, and, finally, a short black clay 
pipe, or dhudeen, in his mouth. Yet even this man, 
delightful to look at, proved when I conversed with 
him just as prosaic and disappointing as the other. 

I certainly did not expect to find anything in these 
two and in scores more I had intercourse with which 
could be set down in a note-book as specimens of 
Cornish humour. One may spend days among Irish 
peasants and never hear anything worth repeating, 
especially in writing. Indeed, most of what we re- 
cognise as Irish humour is not translatable into written 
language. It is like the quality of charm in women, 



156 THE LAND'S END 

something personal which you receive directly and 
cannot convey to another. But you are all the time 
conscious of the humorous spirit in them ; you see 
it in their eyes and mobile mouth and gestures, and 
you catch its accent in their speech. And you feel 
how good a thing it is ; that a people possessing this 
quality, or faculty, in so eminent a degree is not so 
poor as others who have more comforts and are more 
civilised ; that even want and squalor, and misery, 
and vice, and crime, are not as ugly and disgusting as 
they appear among those who are without this spark- 
ling spirit, this lightning of the soul, with its un- 
expected flashes, which throws a brightness on 
everything. 

The people of the extreme west of Cornwall have 
so close a resemblance to the Irish in feature and ex- 
pression that quite often enough when with them, in 
farms and hamlets, I could hardly avoid falling into 
the illusion that I was in Ireland. It is this look in 
them, or in many of them, which makes the want of 
the Irishman's most engaging quality so strange and 
almost incredible. There is an expression of the Irish 
peasant's face which is exceedingly common — one 
could almost say that it is universal — which one comes 
to regard as an expression of a humorous mind. It is 
most marked in those who see you as a stranger 
among them, or in those you meet casually and con- 
verse with. It is a peculiarly shrewd penetrating look 
in the eyes, which appear to be examining you very 
narrowly while passing itself off" as mere friendly 
interest in you ; and with that look in the eye there is 



CORNISH HUMOUR 157 

a lighting up of the whole face. The man, you imagine, 
is looking out for some signal of a sympathetic or 
understanding spirit in you, a token of kinship : but 
when we go further and imagine it a humorous spirit 
we are probably mistaken. We associate that peculiar 
expression of the eyes with the humorous mind be- 
cause we have found them together in so many per- 
sons — if we have been in Ireland. In the Cornishman, 
too, that same expression of the eyes is exceedingly 
common — an expression which even more than feature 
makes him differ so greatly from the Anglo-Saxon. 
But it does not denote humour, seeing that he is in- 
ferior to the dullest of the English in this respect. 
But he is more alive than the Englishman, and his 
ever-fresh child-like curiosity makes him seem more 
human. 

This peculiar Irish-like alertness and liveliness of 
mind, with a total want of a sense of humour, struck 
me forcibly in the case of another Cornishman I 
encountered in my rambles. But before I get to 
this story another must be told by way of intro- 
duction. 

Frequently in my wanderings on foot in that stoniest 
part of a stony land, called the Connemara of Corn- 
wall, where indeed the likeness of the people to the 
Irish is most marked, I recalled an old anecdote about 
a stony country which I heard in boyhood. I heard it 
one morning at the breakfast table in my early home 
in South America. We had a big party in the house, 
and the talk turned on the subject of sharp and clever 
replies made by natives to derisive questions asked 



158 THE LAND'S END 

by travellers. Several of the men present had been 
great travellers themselves, and almost every one had 
a good story or two to relate, but the best of all 
was one of a traveller who had been walking for many 
hours in one of the stoniest districts he had ever been 
in. As far as he could see on every side the earth was 
strewn with masses of stone, and he was quite tired 
of the endless desolation. At length he came on a 
native engaged in piling up stones in a field, and 
approaching him addressed him as follows : " My 
good man, can you tell me where the people of these 
parts procure stone with which to build their 
houses ? " That was the mocking question, and the 
witty answer of the native created a great laugh at 
the table, but unfortunately I have forgotten what it 
was. I have tried in that stony place to recall it 
without success. It may be that some reader of this 
chapter has heard and remembers the answer ; if so, 
I hope he will have the goodness to communicate it to 
me, and relieve my tired mind from further efforts to 
recover it. 

Now one day in Cornwall, while walking on a vast 
stony hill above the little village of Towednack, I 
spied a man at work digging up stone in the middle 
of a freshly ploughed field at the foot of the hill. 
He had a crowbar, which he would thrust down into 
the soil to find where there was stone near the surface; 
then with his three-cornered, long-handled spade he 
would dig down and expose it, and if too large to be 
lifted he would, with drill and wedges and iron mallet, 
split it up into pieces of a convenient size. In this 



CORNISH HUMOUR 159 

way he had raised a vast heap of stones, which would 
be carted away by and by. 

It came into my head to try my old story as an 
experiment on this man, and I went down the hill to 
him and after saluting him stood some time admiring 
his tremendous energy. He was a slim wiry man of 
about thirty or thirty-five, good-looking, with a Celtic 
face and that lively shrewd expression which one 
associates with the Irishman's humorous spirit. After 
watching him for a few minutes at his frantic task I 
said, "By the by, I wish you would tell me where 
they get the stone in this part of the country to 
build their houses with ? " 

He turned and stared me in the face with the 
greatest astonishment, then throwing out his hand in 
an angry way towards the vast heap of black wet 
chunks of granite he had dragged out of the earth, 
he cried, "This is stone ! This is what they build 
houses with in this part of the country ! Stone ! — 
granite ! — there's enough of it in the ground to build 
all the houses we want, and on the ground too ! " 

Then he stared again and finally waved his arm 
towards the hill I had descended from, strewn all over 
with huge boulders and masses of granite, and added, 
" All you've got to do is to use your own eyes and 
they'll show you where we get stone to build houses 
with ! " 

I was obliged to explain that I had only asked that 
preposterous question in fun : then he calmed down 
and stood silent for some time, with eyes resting on 
a chunk of granite at his fcet y revolving the matter 



160 THE LAND'S END 

in his mind, but he did not appear to think there was 
anything very funny in it. But the extraordinary 
thing was that after he had quite got over the un- 
comfortable feeling I had given him — the suspicion, 
perhaps, that his interlocutor was not quite right in 
his head — he proved as lively and agreeable a talker 
as I have met among the Cornish people of his class, 
and gave me an entertaining account of the various 
occupations he had followed since the tin-mine in 
which he had worked as a boy had been abandoned. 
He was, in fact, a very intelligent fellow, with nice 
feelings and sentiments, and as pleasant to talk with 
as any one could be without a sense of humour. 

When we look for something and find it not our 
non-success is apt to produce a dogged spirit in us 
and we go on looking even after our reason has 
assured us that the object sought for is not there, or 
has no existence. That is how it was with me ; I 
was determined to find that rarity in Cornwall — a 
man with a sense of humour. And in my quest I 
did not hold my tongue about my encounter with the 
stone-digger ; I told it to at least a dozen persons 
and they one and all received it coldly. The last one 
was a farmer ; he listened attentively, then after an 
interval of silence remarked, " Yes, I see ; the man 
did not understand your question in the sense you 
meant. It was a joke and he took it seriously ; I 
see. 

He saw but he didn't smile, and I thereupon re- 
solved never again to tell the story of the man digging 
granite in a ploughed field to any one in Cornwall. 



CORNISH HUMOUR 



161 



Another instance of this curious child-like simplicity 
of mind in the native was almost painful. To have 
one's words taken literally in some cases produces the 
uncomfortable feeling that there is something wrong 




CORNISH PEASANT 



with the brain of the person spoken to. I was walk- 
ing on the moor one day in spring in oppressingly 
warm weather when, on passing close by a small 
farm-house, I caught sight of the farmer standing 
outside and stopped to have a little talk with him. 



1 62 THE LAND'S END 

He was a handsome intelligent fellow with a very 
pleasing expression, and in a few minutes we were 
talking and laughing like old friends. " How far is 
it to Zennor ? " I said ; " I'm walking there." He 
answered that it was exactly five miles from his door. 
"Then," I returned, "I wish you could tell me 
how to get there without going through the inter- 
vening space." He looked strangely puzzled. " Well 

" he began, and then stopped and cast down his 

eyes. " Really — I don't quite see " he started 

again, and again stopped, more puzzled than ever. 
Then he made a desperate effort to grapple with the 
problem. "You see, it's this way," he said; "the 
space is there — you can't get over that, and so I can't 

quite make out how " But I was sorry to see 

him distressed and quickly changed the subject, to his 
great relief. 

I was told by the vicar of a parish I was staying in 
that one had always to remember that the Cornish 
people take what is said literally ; if you forget this 
and inadvertently make use of some little figure of 
speech so common in conversation that it is hard not 
to use it, you are apt to get into trouble. The vicar 
himself, after twenty years' intimate relations with his 
parishioners, was liable to little slips of this kind, as 
I found. One day when I was there a man from a 
neighbouring hamlet came to the village and by 
chance met the vicar. " Why, Mr. So-and-so," ex- 
claimed the latter, shaking hands with him, " it's a 
hundred years since I saw you ! " Then after a little 
friendly talk they separated. But that unlucky phrase 



CORNISH HUMOUR 163 

stuck in the man's mind, and he spent most of the 
day in going into the houses of all his intimates in 
the village and discussing the subject with them. 
" He said it were a hundred years since he saw me — 
now what did parson mean by that ? " When, anxious 
to make a little mischief (having nothing else to do), 
I reported the matter to the vicar, he slapped his leg 
angrily and exclaimed, " That's how it is with them ! 
There's an instance for you ! " But it was a very 
delightful one, and in another moment his vexation 
vanished in a burst of laughter. 

One might imagine that such misunderstandings 
simply result from stupidity. It is not so, unless 
we say that stupidity is nothing but the want of that 
sense which acts on our social intercourse much as the 
thyroid gland does on the bodily system, or, to take 
another image, like that subtle ingredient of a salad 
which " animates the whole." Curious to say, the 
most striking instance I met with of this want was 
from a man of that unpleasant class who must be for 
ever doing or saying something to raise a laugh. 
They are found everywhere, even in Cornwall, and 
are common as is the " merry fellow" described over 
a century ago in the Rambler — the man whose ready 
hearty laugh and perpetual good humour and desire 
to say something to make you happy proceed from 
his high spirits. He is quite tolerable : the would- 
be witty or humorous person, the clown in the 
company, determined to live up to his reputation, is 
rather detestable, and reminds one of the actor who 
can never be himself but is always posing to an 



164 THE LAND'S END 

audience even when alone with his wife or nursing 
the baby when his wife is asleep. 

I travelled with my Cornish funny man from 
Truro to Exeter, and as we talked the whole time 
I got to know him pretty well. He was a middle- 
aged, strong, good-looking fellow, and a good type of 
the shrewd, hard-headed Cornishman of the small- 
farmer class ; he was a farmer and cattle-dealer, and 
had been head gamekeeper on a large landowner's 
estate. The trouble was that he prided himself on 
his wit and humour, or for what passes as wit among 
the people of his class, and, above all, on his good 
stories. He would now tell us a story, he would 
say, which would make us <c die with laughing," and 
when it was received without a smile he was puzzled, 
and assured us that he had always considered it one 
of his best stories. However, he had others, plenty 
of them, which we would perhaps think better ; but 
these were better only because they were coarser and 
more plentifully garnished with swear words, and in 
the end the other passengers — two or three grave 
elderly gentlemen, who had an armful of books and 
papers to occupy their minds — refused to listen any 
longer. He then gave it up, but being of a social 
disposition he continued to converse with me in 
a quiet sober way, but there was now a little cloud on 
his countenance which had been so sunny before, as if 
our want of appreciation had hurt him in a tender 
part. The hurt had, perhaps, made him quarrelsome ; 
at all events we presently tell out over a very trivial 
matter. We were discussing the scenery through 



CORNISH HUMOUR 165 

which we were passing when he remarked on the 
prettiness of a scene that came before our eyes and 
I agreed ; but by and by when he used the same ex- 
pression about another scene I disagreed. " Do you 
not then see anything to admire in it ? " he asked, 
and when I said that I admired it he wanted to know 
why 1 refused to allow that it was pretty after having 
called something else pretty because I admired it ? 
He began to harp on this subject and to grow 
satirical, and wanted to know of every scene we 
passed whether I called it pretty or not, and if not 
why not. My replies did not seem to enlighten him 
much, and at last in a passion he begged me to tell 
him in plain language, if of two scenes we both 
admired one was pretty and the other not pretty, 
why he called them both pretty. I answered that it 
was because he had a limited vocabulary. 

He threw himself back in his seat and looked at 
me as if I had struck or insulted him, then ex- 
claimed, " Oh, that's it — I have a limited vocabu- 
lary ! " and presently he added bitterly, " This is the 
first time in my life that I have been charged with 
having a limited vocabulary." Without saying more 
he got up, and going into the corridor planted his 
elbows on the sill, and supporting his head with his 
hands, stared gloomily at the landscape for about a 
quarter of an hour. Then he came back to his seat 
and looked at me with a different countenance ; the 
expression of sullen resentment had changed to a 
quite friendly one but overcast with something like 
regret or shame, and speaking in a subdued manner 



1 66 THE LAND'S END 

he said, " You are right, and I deserved it. I know 
it is a great fault in me, but I assure you that when I 
use bad words in conversation I mean no more harm 
than — what shall I say ? — than a woman when she 
says, ' Oh, bother it ! ' or ( Drat the thing ! ' because, 
she can't fasten her blouse or her belt. 'Pon my soul 
I don't ! It's just a way I've got into, and the words 
you didn't like slip out without my knowing it." 
And so on, with much more in the same apologetic 
strain. After that there was peace between us. I was 
indeed rather sorry to lose him at Exeter : as a 
" funny man," without a sense of humour, he had 
greatly entertained me, and wishing him well, I 
hoped he would continue in his mistake about a 
" limited vocabulary " in the sense in which he had 
taken the phrase. 

My friend the vicar, who made the mistake of 
saying it was a hundred years since he had seen some 
one, told me one day that he had been attending a 
meeting of the clergy of the district, and finding 
himself in conversation with three friends who were 
all Cornishmen of good old local families, it occurred 
to him that it was a good opportunity to find out 
what educated men in the county would have to say 
on such a subject. The question, Did the Cornish 
people have a sense of humour ? took them by sur- 
prise ; they had never considered it — it had never 
come before them until that moment. After some 
discussion it was decided in the affirmative ; the 
Cornish have a sense of humour, but — a very im- 
portant but — it is not the same as the sense of 



CORNISH HUMOUR 



167 



humour in the English people. English humour, 
they said, fell flat in Cornwall, even where it was 
seen, or guessed, that the words spoken were intended 
to be humorous. If they laughed or smiled, it was 
out of politeness or good nature, just to please you. 




CORNISH WOMAN 



And as our humour failed with them, so did theirs 
fail with us : we did not appreciate it simply because 
it was impossible for us, being Englishmen, to see it 
as they did with their Cornish minds. 

A local writer, the late J. T. Tregellas, who wrote 
funny poems in dialect, and surveyed life generally 
from the comic point of view, has a considerable 



1 68 THE LAND'S END 

reputation in the county. In one of his works, 
entitled Peeps into the Haunts and Homes of the Popula- 
tion of Cornwall (Truro, 1879), ms avowed intention 
is to "place before the reader a tolerably exact picture 
of a Cornishman as he is, with all his rough sense of 
honour, his kind heart, his self-reliance, his naivete, 
his ingenuity, and his keen quiet power of wit and 
observation." There are scores of more or less funny 
stories in this book, but one is soon weary of reading 
it, because there is little or no evidence in it of the 
" keen quiet power of wit " one looks for. One 
finds what may be described as primitive humour — 
the humour of children and of men in a low state of 
culture who delight in practical jokes, rough banter, 
farcical adventures, grotesque blunders and misunder- 
standings and horse-play. Of unconscious humour 
there are many examples, which undoubtedly shows a 
sense of humour in the narrator : and 1 will quote 
the conclusion of one of the tales, perhaps the gem 
of the book, in which an old widow relates her three 
matrimonial ventures. "And then I married a tailor 
who did praich sometimes, and was a soort of a tee- 
totaler in his way, and never drinked nothing but tay 
and sich like ; and then he faded away to a shaade, 
and this day three weeks he died ; and ater he was 
dead they cut un oppen to see what was the matter 
with un. But waan of the young doctors that helped 
to do ut towled me that he died all feer and they 
couldn't find nuthin in un but grooshuns [tea sedi- 
ment.] I woant have nothin' of that soort agen, but 
I'll get a farmer with a little money ; and so I oft to, 



CORNISH HUMOUR 169 

for I've got twenty pounds a year and a house to live 
in. 

Books of this kind do not help us much ; they 
are, on the contrary, apt to be misleading when the 
author has an intimate knowledge of the people and 
dialect — and, besides, a little invention. 

There are, I take it, two common sorts of un- 
conscious humour ; one into which persons who may 
be of humorous minds are apt to tumble through 
thinking too quickly and being too intent on their 
point, and who in their haste snatch at any expression 
that offers to illustrate their meaning without consider- 
ing its suitability. The result may be a bull or a mixed 
metaphor. An Irishman, asked to define a bull, 
after a moment's thought replied, " Well, if you were 
to see two cows lying down in a field, and one was 
standing up, that would be a bull." A Cornishman 
would be incapable of such a reply ; or of the Irish- 
man's retort when his companion, accused of being 
drunk, protested that he was sober : " If ye was sober 
ye'd have the sinse to know ye was dhrunk." He 
makes no bulls and does not know what they are. 
His unconscious humour is of the second kind, which 
consists in saying things in a way which would be 
impossible to any person possessing a sense of humour. 
Here is an example : — 

At St. Ives, one Sunday, I went to a Methodist 
chapel to hear a woman preach — a missioner or gos- 
peller, I think she was called. I did not find her 
a Dinah, for she was rather large and stout, of a high 
colour, with black eyes and hair. But it was a singu- 



170 THE LAND'S END 

larly intelligent and sympathetic face, and to hear her 
was a pleasure and a relief, for it was on the eve of 
the last general election, when all the Little Bethels of 
Bolerium were being put to strange uses and pulpits 
were the rostrums of enraged politicians in white ties. 
She, sweet woman, preached only religion pure and 
simple in a nice voice without hysteria and with a 
charming persuasiveness. To hear her was to love 
her. A few days later she left the town, and then 
one who was interested in her work rushed in to the 
minister of the chapel to ask how many souls she had 
won for Christ on this occasion. For she had on 
previous visits been very successful in making con- 
verts. " Not one this time," answered the minister. 
"We were too busy with the elections." 

A remark made by one of the fishermen at a small 
coast village near Land's End about Brett, the marine 
painter, affords another pretty example of the native 
unconscious humour. Brett's outspoken atheism and 
brusque manners greatly offended the fisherfolk, and 
when he began work they watched him very narrowly, 
curious to know what kind of picture so extraordinary 
a person would produce. It astonished them to see 
him use his palette-knife instead of a brush to put 
on paint and spread it over the canvas. They had 
never seen such a method before, and it appeared to 
them wrong or not a legitimate way. One day on 
the beach they were discussing the strange artist within 
their gates with reference to some fresh cause of 
offence on his part, when the remark was made by 
one, " What can you expect of a man who says 



CORNISH HUMOUR 171 

there's no God and paints his pictures with a 
knife ? " 

Here is another instance from Penzance. There 
is a public garden in the town, with beds of flowers, 
benches, a bandstand, a fountain, and at one side some 
tall elm trees with a rookery. The little fishes in the 
basin of water attracted a pair of kingfishers, and 
they haunted the gardens, flashing a wonderful blue 
in the eyes of the people. But they took the fry — 
the little sickly fishes which had cost the town 
several shillings — and the Town Council forthwith 
had them destroyed. I should have said that only 
in a Cornish town could so abominable an instance of 
Philistinism be found had I not witnessed an even 
worse one when staying at Bath, when the Corporation 
of that noble town ordered the killing of the king- 
fishers that frequented the old Roman baths. 

After the kingfishers had been destroyed at Pen- 
zance, the question of the rooks came up for discus- 
sion, and it was resolved to shoot the birds and pull 
the nests down ; but here, as I was informed, the town 
clerk intervened and pleaded so eloquently for the 
birds that they were spared. Now one day a group 
of old men, habitues of the gardens, were sunning 
themselves there and discussing this question of the 
rooks. The birds were there, repairing their old 
nests in the elms with a good deal of caw, caw. 
They were as talkative as the old men, but " deep 
in their day's employ " at the same time. Joining in 
the conversation, I expressed my opinion ot the 
councillors for wanting to destroy the rookery, and 



172 THE LAND'S END 

was asked indignantly by one of the old men how 
I would like it if, on a Sunday on my way to chapel 
in a black coat and silk hat, I were to pass under the 
rookery and something were to happen to my hat. 
I replied that I always attended chapel in tweeds and 
that if I wore a silk hat it would serve me right to 
have something happen to it. Such an occurrence 
would only afford an additional reason for preserving 
the birds. My questioner glared at me, and I judged 
from their looks that the others did not approve of 
such sentiments. 

It was very funny, but I heard an even funnier one 
when listening to the talk of a knot of elderly and 
middle-aged men discussing the treatment the Educa- 
tion Bill was receiving in the House of Lords. But 
it was not in Penzance, and I will mercifully conceal 
the name of the little town in Bolerium where I heard 
it. The men, it must be observed, were all Method- 
ists who had adopted the view of the question which 
the ministers had been expounding in the chapels. 
" What we want in England," said one, " is the 
Russian system, just to remove the men in the two 
Houses who are opposing the will of the people." 
The sentiment was heartily applauded by all the 
others. It was delightfully Cornish — just the senti- 
ment one would expect to hear from the deeply 
religious Cornishman. 

At this same place I heard about a local preacher, 
a man of a very fine character, who was taxed one 
day by his employer with having served as a model 
to an artist of the town, a Mr. Charles. " Yes," he 



CORNISH HUMOUR 173 

said, " I have been sitting to Mr. Charles, and have 
had a good deal of conversation with him." Then 
after a long interval of silence he added, " Yes, I 
have been sitting to him. Mr. Charles has religion, 
but it is very, very, very, very, very deep down." 

This appeared to be a clue worth following up, 
and I at once sought out this man and was delighted 
to know him ; he was, physically and mentally, a 
type of all that is best in the Cornishman, but after 
a long talk on many subjects with him I was convinced 
that he was without the sense of humour. At the 
same time I felt that this was scarcely a defect in one 
of his nature. I felt, too, that something like this 
might be said of the people generally — the sense 
which they lack seems less important in their case 
than in that of others ; it is not so much missed — 
because of their perennial vitality, their fresh im- 
pressible mind and sense of eternal youth and curious 
interest in little things which never fades and fails. 
Here I made the acquaintance of four men whose 
respective ages were eighty-one, eighty-five, eighty-six, 
and eighty-eight. There was no sign of weariness in 
any of them ; they were as much alive and in love 
with life as their middle-aged neighbours and as the 
young, down even to the children. 

These general reflections bring back to mind yet 
one more incident bearing on the point — an example 
of the buoyant child surviving in a man well advanced 
in years. 

I had wasted a day indoors at Penzance reading 
books when, hearing the hour of four strike, I flew out 



174 THE LAND'S END 

for a walk to the neighbouring hills before dark. 
Hurrying along the street, which led me away from 
the front, I felt that I wanted my afternoon cup of 
tea and thought I had better get it before quitting the 
town. I soon came to a small baker's shop, and 
going in and pushing open the door at the back dis- 
covered the baker and his family just sitting down 
to their tea. The women made room for me at the 
table and spoke welcoming words, while the baker 
himself looked at me but said nothing. He was a 
fine specimen of a Cornishman : old and strongly 
built, with a large perfectly bald head, on which he 
wore a skull cap, and a vast cloud of white hair which 
covered the lower half of his face and flowed over 
his chest. He had the broad head, high cheek-bones, 
large mouth and depressed nose, wide at the nostrils, of 
the pure Cornish Celt, and, most marked feature of all, 
the shrewd, prying, almost inquisitorial, yet friendly, 
blue-grey eyes. Those eyes, I observed out of the 
corners of mine, were furtively watching me, but I 
did not resent it. By and by I caught sight of 
another member of the family I had not observed 
before also watching me very attentively with the 
most brilliant eyes in the world — a fine grey parrot 
in a big tin cage at the far end of the room. He 
was standing at the open door of the cage, silent and 
motionless, with his neck craned out in a listening 
attitude. I went over to him and gave him some cake, 
which be accepted in a gentle manner and began 
eating. Then, coming back to my tea, I began 
praising the bird, saying that I knew a lot about 



CORNISH HUMOUR 175 

parrots and admired and respected them because they 
were nearest to our noble selves in intelligence, and that 
I had never seen a finer grey parrot than this one. 
He was silent with me : that was the parrot's way ; 
he was like a wise man, very still and very observant 
of a stranger in the house ; he would watch and 
listen to know what the strange person was like 
before declaring himself. 

The old man did not smile nor speak but got up, 
went to the cage, and taking the bird on his hand 
returned to his seat. Then began a lively game 
between the two : the parrot climbed over and about 
the man, was snatched up and tossed as a mother 
tosses her babe, and finally deposited on the big bald 
head from which the skull-cap had been removed. 
The parrot rubbed his feathered head over the 
shining pate and wiped his beak on it. Then followed 
a fight with lightning-quick thrust and parry, a finger 
and a beak for weapons, after which the bird was 
snatched up and popped, back down, on the table. 
There he remained some time, perfectly still, his feet 
stuck up in the air, but not pretending to be dead, 
for the brilliant white eyes were wide open, keenly 
watching us all the time. Finally the bird twisted his 
head round, and using his beak as a lever turned 
over on his feet, and was invited to kiss and be 
friends. This the bird did, pushing his way with 
careful deliberation through the cloud of beard so as 
to plant his kisses on the lips. 

During the performance I could not help remark- 
ing a singular resemblance between man and bird : 



176 THE LAND'S END 

the same love of fun appeared in their bright, watchful, 
penetrating eyes ; one had as much pleasure in the 
game as the other ; they were, man and parrot, very 
much on a level, very like little children, and like 
children they were without a sense of humour. 

Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that 
children's humour is rudimentary. Undoubtedly 
there are individuals who possess it in a higher or 
more developed state, just as there are children 
who possess the sense of beauty, an ear for music, 
and other faculties of the adult, but such cases are 
exceptional. 

It chanced that just before my meeting with the 
old man of the parrot I had been discussing the sub- 
ject of this chapter with a gentleman of culture in 
the district, a member of an old and distinguished 
Cornish family, who has worked in his profession 
among the people and knows them intimately. He 
demurred to my idea that his countrymen (of the 
lower ranks be it understood) were without the sense 
of humour, and he instanced their " love of fun " as 
a proof of the contrary. Mere love of fun, however, 
always strongest in children and animals, is not the 
same thing as that finer, brighter, more intellectual 
sense we are discussing. 

But how strong the simple primitive love of fun is 
in the Cornish people may be seen at Christmas time 
in St. Ives in their " Guize-dancing," when night 
after night a considerable portion of the inhabitants 
turn out in masks and any fantastic costume they 
can manufacture out of old garments and bright- 



CORNISH HUMOUR 



177 



coloured rags to parade the streets in groups and pro- 
cessions and to dance on the beach to some simple 
music till eleven o'clock or later. This goes on for 
a fortnight. Just think of it, men, women and children 




NORWAY LANE, ST. IVES 



in their masks and gaudy get-up, parading the little 
narrow crooked muddy streets, for long hours in all 
weathers ! And they are Methodists, good, sober 
people who crowd into their numerous chapels on 
Sundays to sing hymns and listen to their preachers ! 



178 THE LAND'S END 

It is fun, pure and simple, and if you mix with them 
and witness their gaiety and listen to their bantering 
talk and happy laughter you will not discover the 
faintest flicker of humour in it all, and if you have 
witnessed the people of some French, Italian or 
Spanish town amusing themselves in this fashion, the 
Guize-dance will seem like a poor, rude imitation of 
the carnival got up by children. 




J\ t C ', ?i*V* ' 



CHAPTER XIII 
THE POETIC SPIRIT 

The naturalist's mind and men's complex nature — An eminent ethnolo- 
gist — The use of fools — The simple animal mind — Herring gull 
and rock-pipit — Man and animals compared — The imaginative 
faculty — Cornish poets — Hawker of Morwenstow — Prose writers 
— Thomas Carew — Purity of race in Cornwall — Dearth of 
imaginative work — A prosaic people — Cornwall and Ireland con- 
trasted — Reason of difference — Cornish legends — Mystery plays — 
Wesley's mission and greatness — Ugliness of Methodism — Effect 
on the child's mind. 



r~JT~^HE naturalist's mental habit of always trying 
to get at the reason and hidden significance 
of things is apt to become a worry when he 
begins to look closely at his fellow-creatures with the 
object of finding out what they really are, or what 
the character of this particular human family or herd 
is compared with that of some other herd which he 
has studied and thinks he knows. Or perhaps it 
would be nearer the mark to say that his anxiety to 

J 79 



180 THE LAND'S END 

classify everything is the source of his trouble, when 
with a Reaumur's skill his curious mind would dis- 
tinguish men according to their racial and tempera- 
mental characters. It vexes his little busy brain, 
which loves neatness and symmetry, that men are so- 
various, so complex, that they have so many hidden 
meanings and motives and instincts — so many in- 
visible threads in the woven texture of their natures, 
which occasionally shine out, yellow and purple and 
scarlet among the threads of sober grey, yet when 
looked at closely, or examined with a magnifying-glass, 
become invisible again. Either he must give up the 
quest and the task in despair or else go doggedly on 
with a sort of stupid courage, trying not to think 
that he is blundering all the time. It is consoling in 
a difficulty of this kind to recall the case of an emi- 
nent ethnologist, who was exceedingly industrious 
and prolific and was very great a short generation 
ago, about which time his learned contemporaries, 
vexed at his facile method of overcoming all difficul- 
ties, rose up against and overthrew him, smashing 
and pulverising his beautiful theories. After which, 
with a very engaging, proud humility, he boasted that 
he had been the fool to rush in where the angels (his 
opponents) had feared to tread, and that to attack and 
overthrow they had had to follow him into new and 
wider fields where they otherwise would never have 
ventured. We must all be fools in the same way, if we 
have a little of that courage which I have called stupid, 
each in his own small sphere, and we certainly do a 
useful thing if, in exposing our thick skulls to 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 181 

knocks (which don't matter), we succeed in giving 
courage to better men. 

If I had not been a fool, or had not troubled my- 
self with this serious question, it would have been 
much pleasanter for me in my rambles at this end of 
all the land, seeing that the inferior animals are so 
very much simpler and more easy to read than men. 
Those donkeys, for example, which I meet on the 
moor, and their scarcely less intelligent friends the 
jackdaws, I know them a hundred times better than I 
can know any man— even my own self. And the 
house-dog too, who is supposed to be mentally more 
like his masters than any other beast — this dog who 
watches my comings and goings out of the corners of 
his eyes and who thinks himself wonderfully clever 
when, knowing that I don't want him, he steals 
secretly off an hour before I go out and meets me 
(by chance) among the furze bushes a mile from 
home — do I not know every thought in his curly 
black head, if his little mental trick of putting two 
and two together can be called thought ? And the 
gulls on the cliff — do I not know just how they will 
comport themselves ; how each bird will eye me 
suspiciously, sideways, with one brilliant eye at a 
time ; how they will rise and float and dwell on 
the air, or sit on a rock with beaks to the wind — do 
I not know every word they will say in their herring- 
gull language ? 

It is true they will now and then do a thing which 
will come as a surprise. Here is an example — an 
incident I have just witnessed. All day the wind had 



1 82 THE LAND'S END 

been blowing half a gale from the sea when I went 
down to the rocks to get a good mouthful of air 
before it was dark. There were the gulls at the 
usual spot ; and no sooner had I climbed into a 
sheltered nook among the rocks than they were all , 
up floating overhead, swooping and rising, and pour- 
ing out their insistent loud anxious angry cries. For 
they were just beginning to nest on the ledges of the 
cliff beneath me and were troubled at my presence. 
In spite of the very cold wind and the growing ob- 
scurity, when the sun had gone down, I kept my 
place for upwards of an hour, and for the whole of 
the time they continued soaring and screaming above 
me : now with extended motionless wings seeming 
not to move yet mounting all the time, higher and 
higher, until they would be four or five hundred 
yards above me and would begin to look very small ; 
then down and down again in the same imperceptible 
way, but sometimes descending with an angry rush 
until they were no more than thirty or forty yards 
high and one bird among them would make a violent 
swoop to intimidate me, coming to within a couple of 
yards of my head with loud swish of wings and 
sudden savage scream. I noticed that the swoops 
were all made by one bird, that this same bird acted 
throughout as fugleman and leader, that whenever 
the others began to drift away, further and further 
apart, and their cries grew fainter and less persistent, 
he or she reanimated them and brought them back 
with a fresh outburst of fury, emitting louder screams 
and dashing down in a more violent manner. The 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 183 

longer I watched them the more wonderful appeared 
the difference in disposition between this one bird, 
this white flying image of wrath, and the others. 

Now at intervals of about three or four minutes 
my attention would wander from the gull to see and 
listen to a rock-pipit that had its home at that spot 
and was also nesting in a chink quite close to the 
gullery. Every day and all day long, in all weathers, 
the little singer could be seen and heard at that ex- 
posed spot, soaring up at intervals to a height of a 
couple of hundred yards ; then slowly falling back to 
the rocks, head down, tail spread and wings pressed to 
its sides with the quills standing out — a shuttlecock 
or miniature parachute in figure ; and while descend- 
ing he emitted the series of airy tinkling sounds that 
make his melody. And now, in spite of the late- 
ness of the hour and increasing gloom on the sea 
and clouded sky and of the cold wind, the little 
creature would not desist from its flight and song. 
Its little big passion was as strong and inexhaustible 
as that of the enraged gull. Then occurred the in- 
cident I set out to tell : the gulls with their prolonged 
monotonous wailing cries were balanced in the air at 
a height of ninety or a hundred yards, their trumpeter 
and inspirer keeping in the centre of the scattered 
company directly above my head. The pipit shot up 
from the pile of rocks in which I was lying, and ris- 
ing obliquely from the land side reached the highest 
point of its flight well over the sea, and then just as 
it set its feathers to begin its descent a furious gust of 
wind caught and whirled it landwards, still emitting 



1 84 THE LAND'S END 

its tinkling sound, into the very midst of the com- 
pany of hovering gulls. No sooner was it among 
them than the angry, alert leading bird, half closing 
its wings, swooped down on the little tinkler, and 
instantly a frantic chase began, with lightning-quick 
doublings, now over the sea, now the land, the gull 
with its open beak almost touching the terrified little 
fugitive. " Save yourself, pipit ! " I exclaimed, for 
another inch and the small spotted singer would have 
been in the big hungry yellow beak and flight and 
tinkling song ended for ever. And in another mo- 
ment the tension was ended, for the little thing had 
gained the rocks and was safe : but it sang no more 
that evening. 

Now, strange as all this may seem — that the pipit 
should live and breed just by or among the herring 
gulls, ready at all times to seize and devour any 
living creature that comes by chance in their way, 
and that it should go on ascending and descending, 
singing and singing, every day and all day long, just 
where the gulls are perpetually floating and flying 
hither and thither, always on the look-out for some- 
thing to devour — it is but acting in accordance with 
its known character. The small bird is without fear 
of its big rapacious neighbours : it has its own quick- 
ness and adroitness to save it from all natural dangers 
of winds and waves and killing birds ; it was only the 
rare chance of that gust of wind striking it just when 
it paused in mid-air before dropping, and carrying it 
away sideways into the midst of the herring gulls, 
which so nearly cost it its life. On the following 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 185 

morning the gulls would be there, flying about hungry 
as ever, and the pipit would go on with flight and 
song in the same old way, free as ever from appre- 
hension. And as with the pipits so it is with all 
creatures that are preyed upon : sudden violent death 
as the result of any failure, or mistake, or slight acci- 
dent, is a condition of wild life, else its vigour would 
not be so perfect and its faculties so bright. 

Every day, in fact, when I am observing the actions 
of birds, or of animals generally, from a dog or a 
donkey to a fly, I may witness something unexpected, 
an action which will come as a surprise ; but this 
will be only because of its rarity, or because it comes 
about through a rare concurrence of circumstances, 
but not because the creature has acted in any way 
contrary to its nature. 

It is sadly different (sadly, I mean, for the natural- 
ist) with regard to human beings. You cannot gen- 
eralise from the actions of an individual as you may 
safely do in the case of a titlark or a gull or a donkey. 
You study a dozen or a hundred, and then begin to 
think that you have not had a sufficient number 
owing to the variety you have noticed, and you study 
a hundred more and after all you are still in doubt. 
It may appear that, in the last chapter, I have not 
shown much doubt as to the want of a sense of 
humour (as we understand it) in the Cornish. J 
have not ; but when it comes to another and a 
greater faculty — imagination, to wit — I am not very 
sure. 

If it could be taken for granted that a people who 



1 86 THE LAND'S END 

have never produced any artistic or literary work 
worth preserving are without imagination, to use the 
word in its higher sense, as the creative faculty, the 
question would be a very simple one, seeing that Corn- 
wall has given us nothing or next to nothing. Compare 
it in that respect with the adjoining county, divided 
from it by a little river, but distinct racially : what 
lustre Devon has shed on the whole kingdom ! how 
many of her sons are so great in arms and arts, above 
all in literature, that we regard them as among the 
immortals ; and what a multitude of lesser men who 
have made us richer in many ways ! Now as one 
with a very superficial knowledge on this subject I 
have put the following question to the three men of 
my acquaintance who have the widest knowledge of 
English poetic literature : " Has Cornwall ever pro- 
duced a poet ? " and in each case came the quick 
reply, " Yes, Hawker of Morwenstow." Now Hawker 
is a great man to us on account of his strong and 
original character, but he was a very small poet ; 
I should say that during the last half- century 
England has always had twenty or thirty living 
minor poets who rank high above him. Finally, he 
was not a Cornish but a Devon man, and it there- 
fore struck me as exceedingly curious that I should 
have had that same answer from the last of the three 
friends interrogated, seeing that he is himself a highly 
accomplished poet, a Devonian whose birthplace is 
just on the borders of the duchy. The reply — " Yes, 
Hawker of Morwenstow " may then be taken to mean 
" No, not one." 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 187 

Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Cornwall has 
contributed absolutely nothing to literature. I have 
already sung the praises of Richard Carew's work ; 
but he was a prose writer — he failed pitifully when he 
attempted verse ; he therefore stands on a lower level, 
with perhaps two or three more who have written 
good prose — William Scawen and Borlase, the anti- 
quary, may be mentioned. But there is Thomas 
Carew, the lyrist, and friend of Donne, Suckling and 
Ben Jonson — if he may be called a Cornishman. His 
name is not included in Boase and Courtney's monu- 
mental Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, in the preface of which 
work they courageously say, " The writers of Corn- 
wall bear no inconsiderable place in the literature of 
their country." But if we take it that this Carew was 
a Cornishman, though born out of the county, we 
must admit that Cornwall has produced one good 
poet. He does not count for very much, however — 
this one poet who lived three centuries ago and wrote 
half a dozen little things that sparkle like diamonds — 
seeing that he was of that class which is never native, 
of the soil. Even in those old days men of birth did 
not spend their lives at home ; they attended the 
court and went forth wide in the world wonders for 
to see, and intermarried with families outside of their 
own class, so that, like the Jews among us, they were 
and always are, racially as well as socially, a distinct 
people among the people. Norman and Saxon and 
Dane are we, says the poet truly enough, and he might 
have added Celt, but the mixing process has been 
infinitely greater in the upper ranks. The Cornish 



1 88 THE LAND'S END 

people, I take it, are Celts with less alien blood in 
their veins than any other branch of their race in the 
British Islands. 

One day in a village street I met a fine athletic- 
looking oldish man with a very marked characteristic 
Cornish face, but painted by alien suns to deepest 
brown, and that colour of the tropics contrasted oddly 
with the bright blue-grey eyes and reddish-grey beard. 
He laughed when I said that I supposed he was a 
stranger there. Yes, a stranger in a sense, he said, 
since he had been away over forty years, working in the 
mines, in America, Africa and Australia. But his forty 
years' labour had not hurt him much ; he felt young 
still and was going back to Queensland after a little 
look round. For one thing he had never touched 
alcohol in his life and he would like to pit his strength 
against that of any man of thirty in that village where 
he was born sixty-seven years ago. Yes, it was his 
own native place which he had come back after forty 
years to have a look at. His people were there still, 
and had been there to their certain knowledge over 
six hundred years. And I dare say, he added, if we 
knew all we could say a thousand. 

Five or ten thousand would perhaps have been 
nearer the truth. And so it is with the common 
people generally. They have become great roamers 
nowadays ; they go forth in hundreds every year into 
all parts of the world, but they appear to cherish the 
old Cornish feeling against marrying among strangers; 
they return after few or many years to find wives, and 
that, I conjectured, was the old miner's motive in 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 189 

coming back to his village "just to have a look 
round." One of the saddest things in this perpetual 
going and coming is that a great many men, young 
and in the prime of life, return after contracting 
miner's disease, usually in Africa ; and though it is 
known to every one that they are doomed men, they 
marry and live just long enough to leave a child or 
two before they are gathered to their fathers. 

To return to the main point. Is this surprising 
dearth of the creative faculty, or of genius, in art and 
literature a good criterion — does it justify us in saying 
that the people are devoid of imagination ? 

For an answer one can only go to the people them- 
selves — not to those of good birth who are in a sense 
foreigners, or different racially as we have seen, but 
to the true natives who remain from generation to 
generation on the land. We are told so often and so 
insistently by persons who speak with authority that 
the Celts are an imaginative people that we come to 
regard it as an established fact, beyond controversy, 
as true, for instance, as that the blood of a dark-haired 
person is heavier than the blood of a blonde. It 
consequently came to me as a great surprise to find 
that a people so markedly Celtic as the Cornish were 
the most prosaic I had ever known. At first I could 
not quite believe that it was so : it was only that I 
was a stranger among them and had not yet found 
the way to the hidden romantic vein and poetic spirit 
in them. Gradually it was borne in on me that the 
vein was not there, that it had no existence — that my 
wish and no secret living spring or hidden treasure in 



190 THE LAND'S END 

the earth had caused the hazel twig to dance and dip 
in my hand. Or, if they had it, then, like their sense 
of humour, it was of that lower or undeveloped root 
kind discoverable in children and in primitive people. 

Undoubtedly this is contrary to the conclusion any 
person would most probably form on a first and 
superficial acquaintance with the people, on account 
of their manner and disposition, in which they differ 
so greatly from the more stolid, slower-moving, think- 
ing and speaking English peasant. Nevertheless in 
the English peasant in the north, south and Mid- 
lands, in spite of that seemingly mental and physical 
heaviness and absorption in the purely material things 
which concern him in his struggle for existence, I 
have found that hidden vein of romance and that 
poetic feeling which 1 have failed to find in West 
Cornwall. 

On this subject I do not venture to speak of the 
Cornish people generally. There may be important 
differences. I have been told that in the more 
easterly parts, particularly in mining districts, the 
people are not of so lively, friendly and communica- 
tive a disposition as in West Cornwall ; but I assume 
that here, in Bolerium, we get the least mixed, the 
truer, Cornishman. Here it seemed to me that not 
only with regard to the aesthetic faculties, but in 
various other ways too, in mind and disposition, they 
are like children of a larger growth. On this point 
however, one may very easily go wrong, since the 
same thought will sometimes strike us with regard to 
other Celtic families. Yet in Cornwall I could not 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 



191 



get away from the idea that the child-like traits in the 
character of the people were not merely a matter of 
disposition, of the buoyant child surviving in the man, 
but that it marked a lower stage in mental develop- 
ment. This may be wrong : but after all what one 
wants is a working theory, and it does not very much 




CORNISH LABOURER 



matter whether it be true or false so long as it enables 
us to get over the ground. 

When we live with savages, or uncivilised people, 
it is very much like living with children ; we get to 
know them as we never know the civilised beings 
we spend our lives with although they are our own 
people. For however unexpected their changes ot 
temper and actions may be, especially where these 
place us in sudden peril, we yet know that they are 
only feeling, thinking and acting in accordance with 



192 THE LAND'S END 

their true natures. They are not quite so simple and 
easy to read as the lower animals ; nevertheless the 
difference between the uncivilised and civilised man 
is so immense that we can say of the first that it is as 
easy to understand him as it is to understand a dog or 
a donkey or a child. 

It may also be observed that there is a vast differ- 
ence in this respect between the members of separate 
classes in the same community, in spite of their racial 
relationship — between peasant and gentleman ; and it 
may perhaps be taken as a truth that complex con- 
ditions of life make complex characters. The Cornish 
peasant appeared to me easier to understand than the 
English, and, as I imagined, because he was nearer, 
mentally, to the child. It may even be that the 
greater sympathy with children of the Cornish people, 
men and women, is due to this fact that man and 
child are nearer in mind than is the case with the 
English people. They are moved emotionally in the 
same way as children and are liable to gusts of passion, 
and, like children, are apt to be cruel in their anger. 
They are candid, pliant and delighted to serve you 
when pleased, but are subject to petulant and stubborn 
fits, and will brood in sullen resentment for days, 
meditating revenge, for some trivial imaginary slight. 
And they are intensely fond of things which please 
children — gifts, shows, gay colours, noise and excite- 
ment. Here is a little characteristic incident in which 
we see the bad stubborn boy surviving in the adult. 
The late Royal Academician, Hook, was on the sands 
at Whitesand Bay working at a sea-piece when two 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 193 

natives came up and planted themselves just behind 
him. There was nothing the artist hated more than 
to be watched by strangers over his shoulders in this 
way, and pretty soon he wheeled round on them and 
angrily asked them how long they were going to stand 
there. His manner served to arouse their spirit and 
they replied brusquely that they were going to stay as 
long as they thought proper. He insisted on know- 
ing just how long they were going to stay there to his 
annoyance, and by and by, after some more loud and 
angry discussion one of them incautiously declared 
that he intended standing at that spot for an 
hour. " Do you mean that ?" shouted Hook, pulling 
out his watch. Yes, they returned, they would not 
stir one inch from that spot for an hour. " Very 
well ! " he said, and pulled up his easel, then marching 
off to a distance of thirty yards, set it up again and 
resumed his painting. And there within thirty yards 
of his back the two men stood for one hour and a 
quarter, for as they did not have a watch they were 
afraid of going away before the hour had expired. 
Then they marched off muttering curses. 

In all this, and still more in their occasional 
emotional outbreaks, which when produced by reli- 
gious excitement are so painful to witness, the 
Cornish are no doubt very much like other Celts in 
Britain ; but in some things, with one of which alone 
I am concerned here — to wit, the imaginative faculty 
— these separate branches of the race have diverged 
very widely indeed. The old literatures of Ireland 
and Wales live to show it, and in Ireland, at all 



i 9 4 THE LAND'S END 

events, this fountain of inspiration has never ceased to 
flow. It is flowing copiously as ever now, and mak- 
ing us richer every day. What is the secret of this 
great difference — the reason of this creative faculty 
which has given Ireland, in spite of her misery, so 
splendid a place in our literature, which appears like a 
touch of rainbow colour in the humblest peasant's mind, 
and does not exist and never has been in Cornwall ? 
Doubtless from that mixture of blood which came to 
pass in Ireland during those restless centuries of tre- 
mendous changes, when ancient nations were cast into 
another mould, of emigration and conquest and 
colonisation ; and of the fusion of races by inter- 
marriage of the Irish Celts with the mentally more 
virile and imaginative invaders from the north. We 
must assume, too, that this fusion of blood did not 
go so far and hardly took place at all in Cornwall. 
We see that the conquerors left but few and slight 
traces of their occupancy in the peninsula, and the 
presumption is that they did not take root in it, that 
when they had come and conquered and had their 
carousal of blood they were glad to sail or march 
away, like William Gilpin in search of the picturesque, 
from a country of so barren and repellent an aspect, to 
seek for a permanent resting-place in a softer, more 
fertile land. Lord Courtney, in a presidential 
address to the Natural History and Antiquarian 
Society of Penzance, said : " While the wave of 
conquest swept completely over other parts of Eng- 
land, it only just reached this part and then receded. 
The population ot Cornwall in general has remained 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 195 

much more homogeneous, much more Celtic in type, 
than in other parts ; and of all Cornwall there is no 
part like this in which we are met with probably so 
pure a breed of human beings." 

The people were left in their rocky land, and what 
they had been — an ancient crystallised race with the 
imaginative faculty undeveloped — they remained and 
remain to this day. 

It has been thought that because Cornwall is pre- 
eminently the land of strange beliefs and of old tales 
and legends relating to mythical saints and heroes, to 
giants and demons with a great variety of fantastic 
beings — mermaids, fairies, pigsies and piskies and 
other little people — the Cornish are a highly imagin- 
ative people. These things are old survivals, and are 
of the imagination in its childish or primitive stage. 
The belief in all these fanciful beings is pretty well 
dead and gone now ; at all events, I was unable to 
find even an old woman who had anything to say 
of the old beliefs which was not disrespectful. But 
these beliefs undoubtedly kept their hold on the 
Cornish mind very much longer than in any other 
part of the country, and with these beliefs certain 
pagan, or Druidical, observances were also kept up, 
and have only died out within the last thirty or forty 
years. Similar beliefs and observances were as 
common all over England as in Cornwall ; there was 
not a hill or down, or lake or stream, or singular tree 
or rock, which did not have its own special demon or 
genius. All this passed away with the fusion 
of the British Celts with a people in a more 



196 THE LAND'S END 

advanced psychological stage. But although these 
childish things have been put away so long, you will 
still find faint traces of them everywhere, even in 
the most Saxon districts in England. They inspire 
little or no belief, but are kept in memory, like old 
ballads, and passed on from generation to generation. 
In Cornwall belief in them continued to within very 
recent times, and they are remembered still. It was 
said not very long ago by a well-known Penzance 
writer that folklorists, when they come to Cornwall, 
especially the west, complain that the materials are so 
abundant they do not know how to manage them. 
Merely to enumerate and classify legends and beliefs 
in giants, little men, and fairies of a dozen denomi- 
nations, ghosts, souls, semi-devils and phantoms of 
divers sorts, goblins, monsters and mermaids, is more 
than they can do. A very large number of these 
legends, enough, one would imagine, to satisfy the 
greatest enthusiast, have been collected by Robert 
Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England^ 
and by William Bottrell in Stories and Folklore of West 
Cornwall, in three series. There we have it, or as 
much of it as we want, a huge crude mass, the rough 
material out of which an early literature might have 
come had there ever been a mind capable of assimilat- 
ing and giving it literary form. 

When the old language was in a moribund state 
during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, 
there appeared to be but one man in the county to 
lament its passing — William Scawen, who loved the 
old things, old usages and traditions, and who rebuked 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 197 

his fellow-Cornishmen for their indifference with a 
bitter eloquence. But he did not grieve over the 
dying language on account of any noble or beautiful 
or otherwise valuable work enshrined in it. The few 
mystery or miracle plays and other native produc- 
tions which existed (and exist still) were not worth 
preserving. What troubled him was the thought 
that the old ways and spirit were to a great extent 
dependent on the old tongue. The plays were value- 
less as literature and were of the same quality as a 
thousand more which were once performed in most 
parts of England, the loss of which nobody regrets, 
but their performance drew people together from all 
parts to the vast open-air theatre, the p/an-au-Guare, 
and in this way whatever little romance and poetry 
existed in the minds of the people was kept alive. 

A mightier change was to come later, when Wesley 
made his descent on the county about the middle of 
the eighteenth century and converted the people 
wholesale to Methodism. This was in many ways the 
very worst form of religion for a people of the temper 
and character of the Cornish, but it suited them exactly 
at the time it came to them — a dull and stagnant 
period in their history when the Church was indiffer- 
ent. They were a highly emotional race and were 
in a starved condition, hungry for some great excite- 
ment, some outlet for their repressed natures, some 
excuse for a mad outburst, and this gave it them — 
these wonderful gatherings of miners, fishermen and 
labourers on the land, in the old disused theatres 
under the wide open sky, listening to that mysterious 



198 THE LAND'S END 

supernatural man who had it in his power to call down 
God to them. That same God who had been grow- 
ing further removed from their lives and dimmer in 
their minds for years and for generations, until He 
was little more than one of the Cornish giants or 
supernatural monsters believed in by the "old people" 
— now once more an awful stupendous reality, a 
gigantic kite hovering on broad black wings over 
their congregated thousands, his burning, rapacious 
eyes fixed on them, while from time to time he made 
his little tentative swoops to set them fluttering and 
screaming. For they were like terrified fowls and 
chickens in a farm-yard, each expecting and dreading 
to be made a victim — each knowing that his miserable 
soul might not be saved until the winged terror fell 
upon him to grip and bury its crooked lacerating 
talons in his flesh. And when the stoop and grip 
came he rolled on the ground bellowing and shrieking 
to the accompaniment of groans and sobs and piercing 
cries of those around him. Dreadful as this was, 
and horrible and loathsome to witness by any person 
of a decent or reverent mind, it was yet a joy to them 
and gave them what they wanted — a glorious emo- 
tional feast. From the days of Wesley to the present 
time these unseemly spectacles have been common 
throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula, 
as they have been in Wales, and one may be thankful 
that the Irish kept the old faith, which does not 
permit such things, since it saved them from a like 
degradation. 

I rejoice, and all who have any respect and love for 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 199 

humanity will rejoice, that in Cornwall at all events 
these exhibitions are declining. 

Last year one day a Truro acquaintance of mine 
got into a railway carriage in which were five Method- 
ist ministers returning from a conference they had 
been attending. They were discussing the decrease 
in the number of converts and the decline of revivals 
during the last few years. One of them, a stout, 
elderly person, said he did not take so pessimistic a 
view of the position as the others appeared to do. 
He thought the falling off, if there were any, was 
perhaps attributable to the ministers themselves, and 
then added, " All I have got to do is to preach my 
Judgment-Day sermon to set them howling." The 
others were silent for a little, and then one said, " Do 
you think it wise to say much about everlasting 
punishment at the present juncture?" No one replied 
to the question, and after an uncomfortable interval 
they changed the subject. 

One would hardly suppose that the " present 
juncture " would be causing much anxiety in far 
Bolerium ; yet even here in this ancient rocky fast- 
ness of Dissent the trumpets of the New Theology 
are beginning to sound in some of the chapels. Meth- 
odism, on account of its wealth and the perfection of 
its machine, will be the last of the sects to feel the 
impending changes ; but this is a subject which does 
not concern us here, and enough has perhaps been 
said to show that Methodism with its revival cam- 
paigns and notion as to the necessity of sudden 
conversion, accompanied with the outward visible 



2oo THE LAND'S END 

signs of the inner struggle and change — sobbings, 
howlings, contortions and Glory Hallelujahs — is not 
a healthy one for so extremely emotional a people. 

Wesley's fame does not however suffer from these 
sad incidental results of his great propaganda. He 
remains a very great man, the greatest of all the sons 
of the Anglican Church, one who went about his work 
among Celts and Saxons indifferently in a white heat 
which set men's hearts on fire. He had no pleasure 
in seeing people carried so completely away by their 
feelings and behaving like lunatics or frenzied wild 
beasts in a cage ; on the contrary, he abhorred the 
sight of such things even as he abhorred Dissent and 
that "odious familiarity with the Deity" which grieved 
and disgusted his reverent mind in his preachers. 
Nor did he consider, nor was it possible for him to 
know, in his long strenuous life, which was but a 
battle and a march, as the poet has said of another 
leader of men, while like the wind, homeless, with- 
out resting, he stormed across a world convulsed by 
a tremendous religious awakening and excitement 
— he did not know that he was inflicting a deadly 
injury on the Church which he loved above all things 
and clung to all his life long, and, finally, that in the 
end it would all make for ugliness. 

This is indeed the chief cause of the repulsion 
with which Methodism and Nonconformity in general 
is regarded by those who have the sense of beauty, 
whose hearts echo the poet's cry — 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty : that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 201 

There is one God ; but the gods which men worship 
are innumerable as the stars in heaven and as the 
sands on the seashore, and they vary in character 
even as their worshippers do. To go back to the 
dark days of the seventeenth century, we see that 
beauty and whatever was of good report, which be- 
came associated in the Puritan mind with the life and 
forms of worship of their enemies, was a thing accurst. 
And, the human mind being what it is, it was but 
natural that the particular god of their worship came 
to be the very god of ugliness, a despiser of beauty 
who looked with jealousy on those who were won by 
it even as he did on those who kissed their hands to 
the rising moon. He was not the God to whose glory 
the great fanes of England were raised. And from 
that far time "of Oliver's usurpation when all monu- 
mental things became despicable " this same temper 
of mind and dismal delusion has come down to us in 
a hundred denominations with their temples of ugli- 
ness sprinkled over all the land. 

Any house is good enough to worship God in, is 
a treasured saying, and it has been remarked that no 
place of worship has ever been raised by Noncon- 
formity in England which any person would turn 
aside from the road to look at. This would be too 
little to say of the chapels in West Cornwall, where 
the principle of any-house-good-enough has been 
carried to an extreme. The principle may or may not 
be insulting to a personal Deity, mindful of man and 
anxious that man should do Him honour — we cannot 
know His mind on such a question ; but these square 



202 THE LAND'S END 

naked granite boxes set up in every hamlet and at 
roadsides, hideous to look at and a blot and disfigure- 
ment to the village and to God's earth, are assuredly 
an insult to every person endowed with a sense of 
beauty and fitness. You will notice that a cow-house 
or a barn or any other outbuilding at even the most 
squalid-looking little farm in a Cornish hamlet strikes 
one as actually beautiful by contrast with the neigh- 
bouring conventicle. And in a way it is so, being 
suited to its purpose and in its lines in harmony with 
the surrounding buildings, with the entire village 
grouped or scattered round the old church with its 
dignified old stone tower, and finally with the rocky 
land in which it is placed. From such a building — 
barn or cow-house — one turns to the chapel with a 
feeling of amazement, and asks for the thousandth 
time, How can men find it in them to do such things ? 

The interior of these chapels is on a par with their 
exterior appearance. A square naked room, its four 
dusty walls distempered a crude blue or red or yellow, 
with a loud-ticking wooden kitchen clock nailed high 
up on one of them to tell how the time goes. Of the 
service I can only say that after a good deal of ex- 
perience of chapel services in many parts of England 
I have found nothing so unutterably repellent as the 
services here, often enough conducted by a " local 
preacher," an illiterate native who holds forth for an 
hour on the Lord's dealings with the Israelites in a 
loud metallic harsh Cornish voice. 

I observed that as a rule but few adults attended 
the morning services in the villages and small towns ; 



THE POETIC SPIRIT 203 

the women had their housework to do and dinner to 
cook ; the men liked a long rest on a Sunday morn- 
ing, and did not care to wear their best suit of clothes 
the whole day. These all flocked to the afternoon or 
evening services ; but alas for the little ones ! — they 
were all packed off* to chapel in the morning. Again 
and again on taking my seat in a chapel at the early 
service I found myself in a congregation chiefly com- 
posed of children. What can be the effect on the 
child mind of such an interior and of such a service — 
the intolerable sermon, the rude singing, the prayers 
of the man who with " odious familiarity " button- 
holes the Deity and repeats his " And now, O 
Lord " at every second sentence — the whole squalid 
symbolism ! One can but say that if any imagina- 
tion, any sense of beauty, any feeling of wonder and 
reverence at the mystery of life and nature had sur- 
vived in their young minds it must inevitably perish 
in such an atmosphere. 




CHAPTER XIV 

WINTER ASPECTS AND A 
BIRD VISITATION 

Back to the land — Golden days in winter — Colour of dead bracken — 
Lichen on trees in winter — Furze and bracken in winter — A 
New Forest memory — Effect of rain on dead bracken — An artist 
in the rain — Snow and bird migration from the east — The birds 
return east — How the migrants are received at St. Ives — Birds 
taken with fish-hooks — Bush-beating — Dolls and gins for the chil- 
dren — Maimed birds — Wesley revisits St. Ives — A compassionate 
woman — Story of a robin — Mr. Ebblethwaite and the gulls — The 
author follows Ruskin's advice. 

ITT AVING finished, not very satisfactorily perhaps 
either to myself or readers, with the difficult 
subjects which occupy the last few chapters, 
I returned with renewed zest to my solitary rambles 
among the hills and along the coast, particularly to 
that most fascinating strip of country named " Corn- 
wall's Connemara." It was going back to the land and 

204 



WINTER ASPECTS 205 

the simple life in a fresh sense — to have moorland 
donkeys and conies, and daws, gulls and yellow- 
hammers, instead of men for company ; creatures 
whose lowly minds do not baffle us. I doubt if even 
the wildest American of the " new school of natural 
history " would maintain that these friends in fur and 
feathers possess the faculty of imagination in any 
degree. It was very pleasant and restful to sit on a 
granite boulder on the hillside and gaze by the hour, 
thinking of nothing, on the blue expanse of ocean 
and the more ethereal blue of the sky beyond, with 
perhaps a few floating white clouds and soaring white 
gulls in the void to add to the sense of height and 
vastness. 

There is no question that the best days in the 
six months from October to March, which are more 
or less charged with gloom in these northern realms, 
are those rare days when the sky is clear, the wind 
still, and the sun floods the world with light and heat. 
Such days are apt to be warmer here than in other 
parts ; even the adder, hibernating in his deep dark 
den beneath the rocks, is stirred by the heavenly in- 
fluence, and crawls forth on a midwinter day to lie 
basking in the delicious beams. And the entire 
visible world, sea and land, is a glittering serpent, 
its discontent now forgotten, slumbering peacefully, 
albeit with wide-open eyes, in the face of the sun. 

Here, in such weather, the futility of all our 
efforts, whether with pen or pencil, to convey the 
picture to another has forced itself on me. Some of 
the details in a description are visualised and remain, 



206 THE LAND'S END 

but refuse to arrange themselves in their proper 
place and order, and the result is a mere confusion. 
I can but go down to a distance of a mile or two 
from the hills and, turning my back to the sea, look 
at the prospect before me, and omitting all the small 
details speak only of its shape and colour. On the 
right hand and on the left it stretches away to the 
horizon, and it rises before me up to the rock-crowned 
peaks and ridges of the hills, the slopes and the moor 
below splashed and variegated with dead heath-brown, 
darkest green, and dull red, the hues of heather, 
furze and dead bracken ; and everywhere among the 
harsh, rough, almost verdureless vegetation appear 
the granite boulders and masses of rock cropping out 
of the earth. A scene that enchants with its wildness 
and desolation ; also, on wet days and when the air 
is charged with moisture, with its novel and strikingly 
beautiful colour. 

The colour of bracken, living or dead — of a plant 
so universal and abundant — is familiar to everybody, 
yet I would like now to dwell at some length on its 
winter colour because it is a strange thing in itself — 
one of the most beautiful hues in nature which appears 
in a dead and faded vegetation after the beech-like 
brilliant autumn tints of russet, gold and copper- red 
have vanished, and glows and lives again as it were, 
and fades and vanishes only to return again and yet 
again, right on to the time when the deep undying 
roots shall thrust up new stems to uncurl at their tips, 
spreading out green fresh fronds to cover and conceal 
that mystery, even as we cover our dead, beautiful in 



WINTER ASPECTS 207 

death, with earth and with green and flowering plant. 
This phenomenon is common enough, but in no place 
known to me is the landscape so deeply and so con- 
stantly coloured by dead bracken as on these slopes, 
on account of the great abundance of the plant and 
the excessive moisture in the atmosphere. 

In other parts of the county where trees grow a 
curious effect of the excessive humidity is seen in 
some woods, especially in deep valleys and coombes 
sheltered from the winds, in which the mists remain 
longest. Here you will find the trees thickly clothed 
from the roots to the highest terminal twigs with long 
coarse grey lichen like that which grows so abundantly 
on the granite boulders on the slopes and the rocks 
on the headlands. The trees are leafless but not 
naked in winter and look as if covered with a grey 
foliage, or grey with a faint tinge of green. The 
effect is not only singular ; in walking through such 
a wood under the grey canopy of branches, and when 
you come out into an open glade and see the trees in 
multitudes extending far beyond and all clothed in the 
same dim mysterious unearthly colour, you are apt 
to have the fancy that you are in a ghostly wood and 
are, perhaps, a ghost yourself. 

Another singular and magnificent effect of dead 
bracken where it flourishes greatly among furze 
bushes can be best seen among the hills. 

The first time I particularly noticed this effect was 
in April near Boldre, in the New Forest, a good many 
years ago. There was a patch of furze about three acres 
in extent, where the big rounded bushes grew so close 



2o8 THE LAND'S END 

as to touch one another and appeared to occupy the 
ground to the exclusion of all other plant life ; yet it 
could be seen that bracken had also flourished there 
during the previous summer, growing tall among the 
bushes ; for now the old dead and withered fronds 
were everywhere visible lying against or mixed with 
the dark massy spiky branchlets of the furze. Only 
it was so shrivelled and pale in colour, or rather 
colourless, amid the mound-like masses of the dark 
living green as almost to escape the sight. The mind 
at all events took no account of those thin and 
bleached lace-like rags of dead vegetable matter. 

One day I walked in this place when it was raining, 
and after rain had been steadily falling for several 
hours ; but the grey sky was now full of light and the 
wet grass and foliage had a silvery brightness that was 
full of promise of fair weather. The rain-soaked dead 
bracken had now opened and spread out its shrivelled 
and curled-up fronds and changed its colour from 
ashen grey and the pallid neutral tints of old dead grass 
to a beautiful, deep rich mineral red. It astonished 
me to think that I had never observed the effect be- 
fore — this marvellous transformation of the sere and 
almost invisible lace rags to these rich red fabrics of 
curious design spread upon the monotonous dark 
green bushes like deepest red cornelian or reddest 
serpentine on malachite. 

This peculiar beauty and richness of hue is seen 
in its perfection only while the rain is falling and the 
streaming water is glistening on the surface of the 
leaf, but is best when the rain is nearly over and 



WINTER ASPECTS 209 

the clouds are full of light. No sooner does the rain 
cease than the rich glistening red begins to grow dull 
and fades as the wet dries. In a little while, in a 
drying sun and wind, the red hue quite vanishes 
and the fern is again the old faded rag it was 
before. 

In this part of West Cornwall there was more furze 
and bracken together than I had ever seen, where 
both plants grow in the greatest luxuriance, unmixed 
with other tree and bush vegetation, and with nothing 
among it but the grey lichened rocks which served to 
intensify the effect of the intermingled sombre green 
and glistening rich red. Nor had I long to wait for 
the falling drops which brought the loveliness into 
existence, seeing that it rains on most days, and when 
it was mild and the wind not too strong the rainy day 
was nearly as good as the rare golden day of clear 
skies and genial sunshine. 

On one occasion when I was out in the hills feast- 
ing my sight on the beautiful strange aspect of things, 
when the rain was so heavy and continuous that it 
soaked through my waterproof and wetted me, I was 
surprised to find a lady artist at work under a big 
umbrella. She was one of a colony of forty or fifty 
artists in the small town close by, but the first one I 
had seen out in that wild place in wet weather. Her 
subject was a small, rather squalid-looking farm-house 
on the further side of a narrow green field — one which 
could have been better painted on a fine day. I was 
told that the artists of this one colony alone turn out 
about a thousand landscapes a year, and I wondered if 



210 THE LAND'S END 

any one had ever attempted to paint that wonderful 
sight just at their threshold — the dead bracken among 
the furze with the silvery-grey rain on it. 

On the higher slopes where the furze is less abund- 
ant the bracken predominates, covering large areas. 
with its red tapestry, and on most days throughout 
the winter it keeps its deep strong colour, owing to 
the excessive amount of moisture in the air. It dis- 
appears only when the new fern springs and spreads a 
wave of monotonous green over the rough land and 
well-nigh obliterates all other plant life. Only at 
very long intervals there is another winter aspect of 
the hills and moors, when they are whitened with a 
heavy fall of snow. " About every ten years," 
people say ; but although the weather was excep- 
tionally cold in December, 1906, I had no hope of 
witnessing that change, and going away to spend my 
Christmas elsewhere missed the very thing I wanted 
to see. It was not so much the sight of the hills in 
their ghostly white 1 desired as the accompanying 
phenomenon of the vast multitude of birds flying 
from the fury of winter ; for whenever a wave of cold, 
with snow, comes over the southern half of England, 
the birds, wintering in myriads all over that part of 
the country, are driven further west, and finally con- 
centrate on the Cornish peninsula and stream down to 
the very end of the land. 

No sooner had I gone away than the bitterly cold 
weather with snow and sleet, which prevailed over a 
great part of the country at Christmas, swept over 
the southern and western counlies and drove the 



WINTER ASPECTS 211 

birds before it. The first news I had of it was in a 
letter, dated December 30, from a naturalist friend, 
Mr. G. A. B. Dewar, who was staying on the towans, 
overlooking St. Ives Bay, close to Hayle. " I won- 
der," he wrote, " did you see much of the marvellous 
migration scene which took place here on Friday 
morning ? For hours — till about midday — redwings, 
thrushes, larks and fieldfares streamed across St. 
Ives Bay, coming from the east. There was a great 
highway of birds, which must have been miles broad. 
We saw them first from the window as we dressed. 
. . . Most of the birds crossed the Bay, going to- 
wards Land's End, but thousands and tens of thou- 
sands dropped exhausted among the sand dunes, or 
towans, here, and among these I found golden plover, 
ring plover, sanderlings, lapwings, etc. — altogether 
an extraordinary assemblage. On Saturday morning, 
lasting till one o'clock p.m., the birds returned in a 
great highway east again. Mingled among them 
were many small birds, linnets, etc. A most wonder- 
ful pathetic scene, 1 assure you. I wondered if any 
of the travellers crossed the Channel, or whether they 
all stopped in this extreme westerly bit of land. I 
did not think England had so many fieldfares and 
redwings." 

On my return a few days later, I found on inquir- 
ing along the coast that large numbers of the birds 
had appeared at the Land's End towards evening and 
settled down to roost in the furze and heath and 
among the stones. At one house, I was told, numbers 
of thrushes and starlings crowded on the window sills, 



212 THE LAND'S END 

and some of them that were stiff with cold were 
taken in but were found dead in the morning. From 
all I could hear the migration appears to have spent 
itself at this spot. 

To me the " pathetic " part of it was the reception 
the starved fugitives met with from the good people 
along the coast, especially at St. Ives with its horn or 
" island " beyond the town thrust out into the sea, a 
convenient resting-place for the birds after flying across 
the bay. My information on the subject, which would 
fill some twenty pages of a blue-book, was gathered 
from men and lads, mostly fishermen, who had taken 
part in the massacre. Each person buys a handful of 
small fish-hooks, manufactured for the purpose and 
sold, a dozen for a penny, by a tradesman in the town. 
Ten to twenty baited hooks are fastened with short 
threads to a string, two or three feet long, called a 
" teagle," and placed on a strip of ground from which 
the snow has been cleared. To these strips of mould 
or turf the birds fly and seize the hooks, and so 
blind to danger are they made by hunger that they 
are not deterred by the frantic struggles of those 
already hooked. Many birds succeed in freeing 
themselves by breaking the thread in their struggles, 
but always with that bit of barbed bent wire in their 
mouths or stomachs, which must eventually cause 
their death. In one garden where food was placed 
for the birds and their hunters kept out, eleven dead 
and dying birds were picked up in one day among 
the shrubs, all with hooks in their gullets. 

One young fisherman told me with great glee that 



WINTER ASPECTS 



213 



he had found two hooks besides his own in the mouth 
of a blackbird he had taken from his teagle. 

This method of slaying the small birds, most com- 
mon in seasons of snow and frost, and practised with- 




OLD HOUSES, ST. IVES 

out a qualm by the pious natives of all ages from the 
small shiny-faced boy to the hoary-headed ancient 
who can no longer take his seat in a boat — a method 
one would imagine which even the most hardened 
Italian, hungering for the flesh of robins, tomtits and 
jenny wrens, would be ashamed to follow — is not the 



2i 4 THE LAND'S END 

only cruel and brutish one practised. Bush-beating 
is also common in many of the villages and hamlets 
along the coast and in the country generally. Even 
here at this extreme end of Cornwall, a treeless dis- 
trict, there are bits of hedge and sheltered spots with 
a dense bush growth to which birds resort in crowd* 
to roost, and these are the places where bush-beating, 
or " bush-picking " as it is often called, is practised. 
It is a favourite pastime, men and boys going out in 
gangs with dark lanterns and sticks to massacre the 
birds. It is a primitive sort of battue with brooms 
and caps and jackets for weapons, and very many of 
the victims are lost in the dense thicket or in the sur- 
rounding blackness — little bruised and broken-winged 
birds left to perish slowly of cold and hunger and of 
their hurts. 

Even more hateful than these battues and wholesale 
slaughter of the starving immigrants in times of severe 
weather is the little daily dribbling warfare which the 
boys are permitted to wage at all seasons in many vil- 
lages and hamlets against the birds. They are actually 
encouraged to do it; and it is a common thing to find 
fathers and mothers after a visit to their market town, 
giving little hooks and wire and steel gins to their 
small boys. Dolls for the girls and steel gins for the 
boys ! Where there is a little strip of sand on the 
beach the gin is set, covered with a little sand, and a 
few crumbs strewn on it. One result of this practice 
is that many little birds after having been caught get 
away with the loss of a leg or foot. Every day at 
St. Ives I used to see one or more of these poor 



WINTER ASPECTS 215 

maimed creatures — sparrows, wagtails, rock and 
meadow pipits, and other species — painfully hopping 
on one foot or crawling with the help of their wings 
over the ground in search of food. Yet the boys and 
men who do these things every day and are not 
rebuked by their pastors and masters are, or are sup- 
posed to be, the spiritual children and descendants of 
John Wesley, who converted and made them what 
they are, the most religious people in Britain ! 
Wesley, the most compassionate of men, who not 
only loved all creatures but actually believed that 
they too, like men, were destined to know a future 
life! 

" One most excellent end may undoubtedly be 
answered by the present considerations," he said in 
concluding a sermon on this subject. " They may 
encourage us to imitate Him whose mercy is over all 
His works. They may soften our hearts towards 
the meaner creatures, knowing that the Lord careth 
for all." 

I think if he could revisit the scene of his greatest 
triumph of over a century and a half ago ; if he 
could stand, perched like a cormorant, on the rocky 
headland above the town on a misty Sunday morning 
in November or December, and look down on the 
numerous chapels and the people in their best black 
clothes thronging into them ; if he could listen to 
their eager conversation as they went and know that 
they were greatly concerned about the precise differ- 
ences between Methodist and Primitive Methodist, 
between Wesleyans, Bible Christians and the New 



216 THE LAND'S END 

Connexion, with other minute variations in form and 
shades of colouring ; and if he then, casting his eyes 
down to where at the foot of the rock a faint, sharp, 
sorrowful little note is heard at frequent intervals, he 
should catch sight of a maimed rock-pipit or titlark, 
creeping painfully about the beach with the aid of its 
wings in search of small morsels of food among the 
shingle and sea-wrack, his soul would be filled with 
exceeding bitterness. " They do not know, they never 
knew, me ! " I think he would turn away from a 
people who call themselves by his name but are not 
his followers in that which was best in his teaching — 
not in that divine spirit of love and tenderness which 
was in Jesus of Nazareth, in St. Francis of Assisi, 
and in all men whose memories are sacred in the 
earth. 1 think he would pass away in the sea mist 
with a mournful cry which would perhaps be audible 
to the chapel-goers ; and they would wonder at it 
and ask each other what this strange fowl could be 
that uttered a cry as of a soul in pain. 

It is something to be able to say that not all of the 
inhabitants are indifferent to these things. Even in 
St. Ives, where bird-killing is most popular and a 
wholesale slaughter of the spent and hungry fugitives 
intoxicates with joy like a big catch of pilchards — 
where, indeed, bird-killing appears like an instinct as 
well as a pastime, having come down "from ancientie," 
to quote a phrase of Carew — there are some who are 
revolted by it. I am speaking not of visitors and 
English residents, but of native Cornishmen ; and a 
few of these have begged me " to do or say something 



WINTER ASPECTS 217 

to put a stop to these disgusting barbarities " ; and 
again they have said to me, " We can do nothing — 
they abuse us because we forbid them putting their 
traps and hooks on our ground— but you can perhaps 
do something." 

Of these compassionate persons, of different social 
ranks, I will speak particularly of only one, a very ten- 
der-hearted woman, the wife of a working man, a huge 
fellow with the strength of an ox ; and whenever the 
winter-driven birds arrived and were slaughtered in 
great numbers with circumstance of shocking cruelty, 
it was a consolation to her in her distress to think 
that he, her life-mate, although a native of the town, 
had never killed a bird in his life. There was doubt- 
less a strain of mercy in both of them. She told me 
of an uncle who had inherited a house and garden 
in the town, where he had spent his life, whose habit 
it was to take out a basket of food every day for the 
birds. For some two or three years before his death 
one of his little pensioners was a robin with a crushed 
or broken leg that lived in his garden, and the woman 
assured me that when he was taken to be buried this 
bird followed the funeral, and was seen by many of 
those present flitting about close to the grave. On 
inquiry I found that this story was believed by many 
persons in St. Ives. 

I have spoken in this chapter of the little crippled 
birds so often seen in this town and in some of the 
villages, and my belief was that these had all been 
caught in gins and had got away, leaving a foot or leg 
behind. But I occasionally saw a bird with a dang- 



2i 8 THE LAND'S END 

ling leg, and could only account for it by supposing 
that in such cases the leg had been broken by a stone, 
the boys of the place all being greatly addicted to 
stone-throwing at the birds. Later I discovered that 
they were birds which had been caught in gins and 
liberated by their captors. At least a dozen of the 
big boys who spend all their leisure time in taking 
birds with gins on the sands at St. Ives assured me 
that they did not kill the small birds they caught, 
which were not wanted to eat. They killed starlings, 
blackbirds, thrushes and some other kinds, but 
liberated the wagtails, titlarks, robins and a few other 
small species. I also found out that when birds 
arrive in vast numbers in a severe frost or snowstorm 
and are caught with small baited hooks many of the 
smaller birds after the hook has been taken from the 
mouth or gullet are allowed to fly away. One man, 
the most enthusiastic bird-catcher with the teagle in 
the place, after removing the hook from the mouth 
or gullet of the bird he does not want, takes the two 
little mandibles between his thumbs and forefingers 
and wrenches the face open, then tosses the bird up 
to fly away to a little distance, soon to drop down and 
perish in agony. Small birds that are not wanted, he 
says, will sometimes return after being liberated and 
get caught again ; those he liberates will trouble him 
no more. 

These things are perfectly well known to every one 
in the place, and as this man has not been taken 
by his fellow-townsmen to the cliff" and stoned and 
his carcass thrown into the sea as food for dogfishes, 



WINTER ASPECTS 219 

but, on the contrary, as they have friendly relations 
with him and sit in the same chapel on Sundays and 
regard him as a respectable member of the com- 
munity, one can only suppose that nothing in the 
way of cruelty to God's creatures can be hellish enough 
to touch the St. Ives mind. 

But, as we know, there are some exceptions, and 
I must now go back to the compassionate woman 
and to a word she dropped when she spoke to me with 
tears in her eyes of these cruelties. " I'm sure," she 
said, " that if some one living here, who loves the 
birds, would go about among the people and talk to 
the men and boys and not be afraid of anything but 
try to get the police and magistrates to help him, 
he could get these things stopped in time, just as 
Mr. Ebblethwaite did about the gulls." 

But who was Mr. Ebblethwaite, and what was it he 
did about the gulls ? I had been off and on a long 
time in the place and had talked about the birds 
with scores of persons without ever hearing this 
name mentioned. And as to the gulls, they were 
well enough protected by the sentiment of the fisher- 
folk. But it was not always so. On inquiry I found 
twenty persons to tell me all about Mr. Ebblethwaite, 
who had been very well known to everybody in the 
town, but as he had been dead some years nobody 
had remembered to tell me about him. It now came 
out that the very strict protection awarded to the 
gulls at St. Ives dates back only about fifteen to 
eighteen years. The fishermen always had a friendly 
feeling for the birds, as is the case in all the fishing 



220 THE LAND'S END 

places on the coast, but they did not protect them 
from persecution, although the chief persecutors were 
their own children. People, natives and visitors, 
amused themselves by shooting the gulls along the 
cliff and in the harbour. Harrying the gulls was the 
most popular amusement of the boys ; they were 
throwing stones at them all day long and caught 
them with baited hooks and set gins baited with fish 
on the sands and no person forbade them. Then 
Mr. Ebblethwaite appeared on the scene. He came 
from a town in the north of England, in broken 
health, and here he stayed a number of years, living 
alone in a small house down by the waterside. He 
was very fond of the gulls and fed them every day, 
but his example had no effect on others, nor did his 
words when he went about day after day on the 
beach trying to persuade people to desist from these 
senseless brutalities. Finally he succeeded in getting 
a certain number of boys summoned for cruelty 
before the magistrates, and though no convictions 
followed nor could be obtained, since there was no 
law or by-law to help him in such a case, he yet 
in this indirect way accomplished his object. He 
made himself unpopular, and was jeered and looked 
black at and denounced as an interfering person, es- 
pecially by the women, but some of the fishermen 
now began to pluck up spirit and second his efforts, 
and in a little while it came to be understood that, 
law or no law, the gulls must not be persecuted. 

That is what Mr. Ebblethwaite did. For me it 
was to " say something," and I have now said it. 



WINTER ASPECTS 221 

Doing and saying comes to pretty much the same 
thing ; at all events I have on this occasion kept 
Ruskin's words in mind concerning the futility of 
prodding and scratching at that thick insensible crust 
which lies above the impressible part in men unless 
we come through with a deep thrust somewhere. 

The majority may hate me for having followed this 
counsel, but there will be one or two here and there 
v/ho will applaud my courage for having spoken in 
this book of the ugly things as well as of the things 
which flatter. And I will add — in no boastful spirit, 
Heaven knows — that what 1 have written will not be 
forgotten to-morrow, nor next year, nor the year after, 
but will be read some day, with a sense of shame, I 
trust, by the children of the very men who could do 
something and that now, but who refuse to listen 
to me and others, or listen coldly, when we plead for 
the birds. I refer to the landlords, who are absent or 
else shut up and inaccessible in their houses where 
they see nothing and hear nothing ; the local editors; 
the ministers of religion (God save the mark !) ; and, 
above all, the authorities, and county and borough 
councillors and magistrates. They are all very careful 
of their " position " and their " reputation" and cannot 
afford to and dare not denounce or interfere with these 
old pastimes or customs of the people, to which they 
are attached and upon which they look as a right. 








CHAPTER XV 

A GREAT FROST 

A second wave of cold — Migrating goldfinches — Increase in number 
of wintering birds — Beginning of the frost— At Zennor — Feed- 
ing the birds under difficulties — A crippled robin — Crystal fruit — 
Prowess of a fox — Fox and raven — The foxes' larder — Migrat- 
ing ravens — Frosted window panes — Starving birds — Starlings 
going to roost — Evening on Zennor Hill— Heath fires — The windy 
night — Animism and personifications of nature — The end of the 
frost. 

THERE was no second westward movement of 
birds in the winter of 1906-7, although 
another and more intense spell of cold weather 
occurred a month after the one described in the last 
chapter. It looked as if the birds had exhausted 
their powers in their long disastrous flight to and 
from the Land's End, or that some saving instinct had 
failed to come to them on this occasion. Doubtless 
many thousands had perished in that journey over a 
snow-covered country to the extremity of Cornwall, 



A GREAT FROST 223 

and we may suppose that when the weather moderated 
the surviving millions redistributed themselves over 
the southern counties from Somerset to Kent ; also 
that many birds had been continually slipping away 
across the Channel. Many of our migrants, which 
have not a strict migration like the swallow and 
cuckoo, the species which shift their quarters or of 
which considerable numbers remain in this country 
throughout the year, do annually come down in 
batches to the south and remain for a month or so, 
in some cases until December, then vanish, and these 
no doubt continue their journey over the sea. Thus, 
every autumn there is a migration of goldfinches into 
Cornwall, many birds appearing in the neighbourhood 
of Mount's Bay in September and remaining until 
November. These goldfinches have a brighter 
plumage than those which winter in England, and 
appear to form a body or race distinct from the 
earlier migrants having their own seasons and perhaps 
a route of their own. 

To return to the great visitation of birds in Decem- 
ber. I am sure that very many of these, exhausted 
by hunger and cold, dropped out of the winged army 
at the extremity of Cornwall, and remained there until 
the end of the cold season. At all events, when I 
returned to the scene in January, I noticed a very 
great increase in the number of wintering birds, par- 
ticularly starlings, larks, song-thrushes, fieldfares 
and redwings. The weather continued cold and rough, 
with storms of wind and sleet and occasional flurries 
ox snow, until January 21, when the cold became 



224 THE LAND'S END 

intense, and that rare phenomenon in West Cornwall, 
a severe frost, began, which lasted several days, and 
was said by some of the old natives to be the greatest 
frost in forty years, while others affirmed they had not 
experienced anything like it in their lives. 

I was staying at Zennor at the time — that lonely 
little village nestling among its furze thickets and 
stone hedges, with the rough granite hills, clothed in 
brown dead bracken, before it and the black granite 
cliffs and sea behind. I had been amusing myself by 
feeding a few birds that came to the door, and now 
my small company of pensioners, suddenly grown 
tame, began to interest me very much. There was no 
garden to the house, which was situated in the centre 
of the village, with the church on one side and the 
inn on the other — nothing but the road, broadening 
out into a wide bare space on which my window 
looked, with a stone hedge and a fountain of gushing 
water on the other side, where the people dipped their 
buckets and the animals came to drink. Here the 
cows came on their way to and from the farm, and the 
pigs and dogs and a flock of geese ; and as some of 
these animals were always about, they very naturally 
helped themselves to the bread they found in the 
public road. Fortunately the ground-floor window 
had a raised stone platform before it, surrounded by 
iron railings, and I started putting out the food for 
the birds in this area. The cows and pigs could not 
get in there, but some of the most intelligent of the 
village dogs managed to get a share by thrusting their 
paws far in and dragging the scraps out, and the geese 




ZENNOR 



To face page 224 



A GREAT FROST 225 

would follow suit, putting their long necks between 
the rails. The birds, however, fared better than 
before ; thrushes, blackbirds, robins, dunnocks, pied 
wagtails, meadow pipits and one grey wagtail were the 
usual feeders ; the daws, too, would occasionally pluck 
up courage enough to drop down between the railings 
and snatch up something. 

One of my guests was a robin of exceptionally 
small size with a withered leg. This bird was first 
brought to me one evening by some of the children, 
who had caught it in the schoolroom, and thought I 
would be able to do something for it. A more piti- 
able object could not be imagined ; it was nothing 
but a little feathered skeleton ; the " comfortable little 
red waistcoat with legs to it " was now a sharp keel, 
but behind the bone one could feel the little muscular 
heart working away violently. One leg was crushed 
above the knee and was now dead and dried, the 
closed claws hardened into a ball. I assured them 
that nothing could be done to save it, that the most 
merciful thing we could do would be to let it fly 
away into the bushes, where it would quickly fall 
asleep and die without pain in the intense cold. I 
opened my hand and it darted away into the black 
bitter night, but great was my surprise next morning, 
when looking at the company gathered at the window, 
to find the wasted little cripple among them, eagerly 
picking up crumbs ! I was foolishly pleased to see it 
there ; nevertheless it was a pity that it had survived 
the night and in the end lived through the trost, 
seeing that a hopelessly injured and maimed bird 



226 THE LAND'S END 

is, like the caged bird, incapable of its proper 
life, and to any one who can feel for a bird is 
better dead. 

The second day of the frost made a wonderful 
difference in the appearance of the birds out in the 
fields, especially the starlings. These had now lost 
all energy and were seen everywhere moving languidly 
about over the pale frosty turf in a hopeless search 
for a soft place, while others were found gathered at 
some spot sheltered by a stone hedge from the bitter 
north-east wind, standing crowded together in listless 
attitudes, with drooping wings. By degrees the field- 
fares and redwings disappeared. The song-thrushes 
which, next to the starlings, were the most numerous, 
appeared to fare better than the other soft-billed 
species, owing to the abundance of snails in the stone 
hedges. It was a mystery to me how with nothing 
but those poor beaks they were able to get them out. 
Snails were exceedingly plentiful in the crevices between 
the stones, many of them easily got at, but so tightly 
were they glued and frozen to the stone that I could 
not pull them off with my fingers. They were like 
limpets on a rock, yet it was plain to see that the 
thrushes did get a good many out and so saved them- 
selves from starvation. Their anvils were everywhere 
near the walls, each with its litter of broken shells 
about it. The hibernating snails were not only found 
in the stone hedges ; they were also extraordinarily 
abundant among' the sandhills or towans at Lelant 
and Phillack on the coast near St. Ives. They were 
hidden in the sand at the roots of the coarse marram 



A GREAT FROST 227 

grass growing on the hills. Here the thrushes had 
less difficulty in getting them out, and every stone 
lying in the sand was made use of. It amused 
me to find that the favourite anvil at one spot was 
a soda-water bottle which had been stuck deep in the 
soft sand, leaving the round end about two inches 
above the ground. Its form and the faint bluish 
tinge in the clear thick glass gave it the exact 
appearance of a round lump of ice, but the thrushes 
had discovered that it was not ice but something as 
hard as stone, and being immovable, better suited to 
their purpose than the pebbles and small fragments of 
stone lying about on the sand. All round the useful 
bottle the ground was thickly strewn with many- 
coloured broken snail-shells. 

The soda-water bottle reminds me of the appearance 
of a singular and beautiful form of icicle which be- 
came common on the water-courses on the second 
and third days of the frost. I saw it chiefly on a 
stream near Zennor that gushes and tumbles over the 
rocks on its way to the sea and is in great part 
almost covered with a dense growth of dwarf black- 
thorn, bramble and furze bushes. Where the water 
pouring over the boulders splashes the overhanging 
branches the constant drops running down the pen- 
dent twigs grew into globular or oval crystals ; these 
were mostly about the size as well as shape of ducks' 
eggs, pure as the purest glass, and had the appearance 
of a wonderful crystal fruit hanging from stems on 
the dark purple-red sloe bushes. 

I greatly liked to follow this same stream in its swift 



228 THE LAND'S END 

downward course, as it ran through the roughest bit 
of ground in all this roughest spot in West Cornwall, 
and where it finished its course, rushing down through 
a cleft into the sea, the sloping shore was abundantly 
strewn with masses of granite lying everywhere 
among the furze thicket, a spot where adders and 
lizards (the longcripple, as called here) are common 
in summer and a favourite refuge and dwelling-place 
of the fox. A fox belonging to this spot distin- 
guished himself at one of the small neighbouring 
farms at the beginning of the cold spell. There were 
two small farm-houses very little bigger than cottages 
together, with nothing but a cart-road to divide them, 
and each one had its hen-house close by. The fox 
came, and the door not being properly fastened got in 
and succeeded in carrying away eight fowls besides 
injuring several more, without disturbing either the 
inmates of the house or the dogs. A few nights 
later he came again and finding the door locked 
turned his attention to the second hen-house. It was 
built of stone and the door was securely fastened, but 
it had a thatched roof, and getting on it he gnawed 
a hole big enough to let himself in. The fowls 
screamed, the dogs barked, and the farmer, roused 
from slumber, jumped out of bed and seizing his 
gun rushed out. Just as he got up to the hen-house 
he saw the fox pop up out of the hole in the thatch, 
leap down and vanish into the black night. Twelve 
fowls were found dead or dying of their bites as the 
result of this attempt which was not a complete 
success. 



A GREAT FROST 229 

The poor man was very much cast down at his loss 
when I saw him next day. " I've been feeding them 
all the winter," he said, " and they never laid an egg 
until now, and now just when they begin to lay the fox 
comes and kills them ! If I go to the gentleman of 
the hunt he perhaps gives me a shilling a head at the 
outside, and perhaps nothing at all. He'll say, We're 
very sorry for you, but we can't do anything for you 
because the money isn't enough and you should take 
better care of your fowls." He went on in this 
mournful strain for about half an hour and said that 
what made it seem worse to him was the fact that the 
foxes had bred during the summer in the rocks quite 
near the farm, down by the sea, and he never dis- 
turbed them — never had a thought against them ! I 
agreed that it was very hard lines and all the rest, but 
secretly my sympathies were with the fox rather than 
with him and his fowls. 

It was certainly an almost incredibly audacious act 
on the part of the fox, seeing that in letting himself 
down through the hole he had made — " hardly big 
enough for a cat " the farmer said — he had put him- 
self in a trap; yet in spite of the joyful excitement of 
killing and of the screaming and the fluttering of the 
birds he became aware of the danger he was in and 
made good his escape. His mouth must have watered 
for many a day at the recollection of the fowls he had 
killed and left behind, and in the following month he 
actually came again one dark night and made a hole 
as before in the roof and then smelling danger made 
off. 



230 THE LAND'S END 

The day after the second raid 1 was down among 
the rocks and bushes by the sea, half a mile from the 
farm, when 1 heard the repeated angry croak of a 
raven not far away. He was perched on a rock on 
the further side of a gully a couple of hundred yard* 
from me, and getting my binocular on to him I was 
surprised at his excited appearance as I could see 
nothing to account for such a state. Presently he 
rose up to a height of about a hundred yards in the 
air, then turning and letting himself go he came down 
like a raven gone mad, violently doubling about this 
way and that in his descent until, nearing the ground, 
he struck savagely at a fox which I now perceived for 
the first time. A big gaunt-looking dog-fox standing 
motionless on a large rock rising about three feet 
above the surface. Just as the raven made the last 
sudden twist in his flight and delivered his blow the 
fox dropped flat down on the stone as if he had 
dropped dead, then, as the raven rose, he got up and 
stood again, motionless as before. Again and again the 
raven repeated the mad swoop, eight or nine swoops 
following in quick succession, and on every occasion the 
fox threw himself down just as the blow was struck, 
but invariably keeping his face towards the assailant 
with his mouth wide open and all his dangerous teeth 
displayed. Then the raven gave it up ; he could not 
drive the fox from the big flat-topped rock on which 
he had placed himself apparently to defy the bird, 
and he knew, I imagined, that he was playing an 
exceedingly dangerous game. The extraordinary 
manner in which he twisted about in descending 



A GREAT FROST 231 

was evidently meant to intimidate and confuse his 
enemy and enable him to deliver his blow in an un- 
expected place, but there was danger in this method, 
seeing that the least miscalculation or the slightest 
accident would have placed him at the mercy of the 
savage beast hungry to get his sharp teeth into his 
hated black carcass. 

The bird rose high up with a sullen croak and flew 
away out of sight, and only then the fox quitted his 
post. He did not see me among the rocks on my 
side of the gully, although I was able to keep my 
glass on him all the time. He came at a quiet trot 
straight towards me, springing lightly from stone to 
stone and only dropping down to the rough frozen 
ground when there was no other way. After tra- 
velling about a hundred yards in this way he turned 
aside at right angles and went a distance of about 
forty yards straight to a spot where a mass of heather 
grew in the cleft of a rock. Thrusting his head and 
half his body into the heather he began digging and 
presently pulled out something which he had con- 
cealed there and which he now proceeded to devour, 
holding it down with his paws. Having eaten it he 
sat down and licked his chops, then picked up the 
crumbs so to speak and sat down and licked his 
chops once more. Evidently the meat had not satis- 
fied his hunger, for by and by he thrust himself into 
the clump and began digging again, but there was 
no more, and coming out he sat up again and with 
head inclining downwards remained for some mo- 
ments in a dejected attitude, revolving things in his 



232 THE LAND'S END 

mind perhaps, and then, perhaps all at once remem- 
bering that he had another little hoard somewhere 
else, he started up and went off in a new direction 
with the same quiet trot as before, jumping lightly 
from stone to stone, and was soon lost to sight. 

The raven I have spoken of was one of four that 
haunted this part of the coast, where they were very 
much hated by a pair of kestrels. One evening just 
before sunset I had a great surprise — when standing in 
a field half a mile from the sea talking to a farmer a 
flock of thirty-two ravens flew over our heads. It 
was impossible to make a mistake in this case, as the 
birds were flying quietly and low, passing directly 
over us at a height of scarcely forty yards. Un- 
doubtedly they were strangers from a great distance, 
perhaps from the northern extremity of Scotland, and 
were making a tour round the whole island, but I had 
never heard of a migration of ravens into Cornwall 
in winter. 

The two coldest days during the frost were the 
one on which I watched the fox and the day follow- 
ing. In the morning I had found the large window 
panes of my sitting-room thickly coated with a 
beautiful frost pattern, but the sky was clear and 
with the sun shining on the window and a big fire in 
the grate I thought it would soon be gone. It con- 
tinued all day, although the fire never went out ! 
The birds were now in desperate case : it appeared 
as if they had given up searching for food in despair, 
and were now idly waiting for a change or for the 
end, hunched up in -any shelter they could find from 



A GREAT FROST 233 

the deadly north-east wind. The very daws were 
silent now, and dropped their wings like the others, 
as if they had not energy enough to fold them over 
their backs. Even the wren, that most vigorous 
little creature, the very type and embodiment of 
cheerfulness, had now too fallen into the universal 
misery, and came out of hiding languidly if it came 
at all, its feathers fluffed out and not a ghost of its 
sharp angry little voice to scold you with. 

Towards evening on the second of the two worst 
days I went out to Zennor Hill to see the sun 
set from the top and watch the big furze and heath 
fires which were burning far and wide on the moor. 
On the slope of the hill I found a number of small 
companies of starlings, huddled together as usual by 
a hedge-side, making no attempt to feed, there being 
nothing to be got from the iron earth ; and as the 
sun declined they began to rise and fly away south- 
wards to their roosting-place — a spot three or four 
miles inland, where a depression in the moor is 
covered with a dense growth of old furze mixed 
with blackthorn and brambles. Their miserable day 
was ended and numbers of small flocks of from a 
dozen to forty or fifty birds could now be seen 
against the sky, all directing their flight to the same 
point. It was a strangely slow and laborious flight, 
and many of the birds were going for the last time 
to their roost. From the summit where I tried to 
shelter myself from the fury of the wind among the 
large black masses of granite, the scene 1 looked 
upon was exceedingly desolate. The brown moor 



234 THE LAND'S END 

stretched away inland, lonely and dark, to the horizon. 
There was on all that expanse but one small object 
to arrest the sight — a frozen pool a couple of miles 
away which gleamed like grey glass in the level 
beams. Many heath fires were burning, one not above 
a mile from the hill and near enough for one to see 
the yellow flames running before the wind and leap- 
ing a dozen to twenty yards high. The sun seen 
through the vast clouds of dun smoke had the ap- 
pearance of a globe of fiery red copper. After it 
had gone down and the earth began to darken the 
smoke took an intense orange colour from the flames, 
which seen against the pale blue sky gave a dreadful 
magnificence to the scene. 

With this picture in my mind I went down the 
hill, chilled to the marrow, thinking of the birds 
asleep and occasionally disturbing one as I stumbled 
over the stones in the dark and picked my way among 
the black furze bushes. Indoors it was very com- 
fortable, sitting by the fire, with the lighted lamp 
on the table and a book waiting to be read ; then 
supper and a pipe, but through it all that strange and 
desolate aspect of nature remained persistently before 
my inner sight. I went to bed and lay soft and 
warm, covered with many blankets, but did not 
sleep ; the wind increased in violence as the hours 
went on, making its doleful wailing and shrieking 
noises all round the house and causing the doors and 
windows to rattle in their frames. In spirit I was in 
it, out on the hillside where the birds were in their 
secret hiding-places, in the black furze and heath, in 



A GREAT FROST 235 

holes and crevices in the hedges, their little hearts 
beating more languidly each hour, their eyes glazing, 
until stiff and dead they dropped from their perches. 
And 1 was on the summit of the hill among the rude 
granite castles and sacred places of men who had 
their day on this earth thousands and thousands of 
years ago. Here there are great blocks and slabs of 
granite which have been artificially hollowed into 
basins — for what purpose, who shall say ? The rain 
falls and fills them to the brim with crystal-clear water, 
and in summer the birds drink and bathe in these 
basins. But they were doubtless made for another, 
possibly for some dreadful, purpose. Perhaps they 
were filled from time to time with the blood of captive 
men sacrificed on the hill-top to some awful god of 
the ancient days. Now it seemed to me, out there in 
spirit on the hill, that the darkest imaginings of men 
— the blackest phantom or image of himself which 
he has sacrificed to — was not so dark as this dreadful 
unintelligible and unintelligent power that made us, 
in which we live and move and have our being. 

It was this terrible aspect of nature, as I had seen 
it on that evening, which was uppermost in the mind 
of the race at an earlier stage of culture before man's 
cunning brain had found out so many inventions and 
created new and pleasant conditions for his own 
species. When animistic promptings survive in him 
he is now apt to personify nature in its milder bene- 
ficent aspects. Such personifications, fanciful and 
religious at the same time, are common in our 
imaginative writers, especially in the poets, but, when 



236 THE LAND'S END 

lying awake that night, I tried to recall the passages 
I had read just to contrast the brighter picture with 
that dark one in my mind, I could only remember 
one, in a prose writer, and it was this : — 

"Nature is now at her evening prayers, kneeling 
before the red hills. On the steps of her great 
altar she is praying for a fair night for mariners at 
sea, for travellers in lonely deserts, for lambs on 
moors and for unfledged little birds in their nests. 
She appears to me as a Titanic woman, her robe 
of blue air spread to the outskirts of the heath ; a 
veil white as an avalanche extends from her head to 
her feet with arabesques of lightning flame on its 
borders. Under her breasts is seen her purple zone, 
and through its blush shines the evening star. Her 
eyes are clear and deep as lakes, and are lifted and 
full of worship and tremble with the softness of love 
and the lustre of prayer." 

Very curiously in this the only poetic passage I 
could recall the author's religion has mixed itself with 
the sense of a living and intelligent principle in 
nature — that which at times makes nature seem a 
■person to us. The person may be interested in or 
indifferent to us, but is all-knowing and all-powerful 
and cannot be an intercessor. There is no doubt that 
this sense or feeling in us, when strong, is disturbing 
to the religious mind, producing as it does the notion 
of a something unknown and uncanny (probably the 
devil) in nature — something which is ever trying in 
all solitary places to seduce the soul from a jealous 
and watchful God. It was, I think, a religious poet 



A GREAT FROST 237 

and an American who wrote of the "dreadful wilder- 
ness of mind " — I read it when a boy : — 

There is a wilderness more dark 
Than groves of fir on Huron's shore. 

Many of us have just such visions of the person that 
nature is on occasions to us : a woman-Titan, a beau- 
tiful female, the mother of men and of all life, all 
breathing sentient things, and of grass and flowers ; a 
being in whom all beauty in the visible world and all 
sweetness and love and compassion in a mother's 
heart and in all hearts are concentrated and intensified. 
But it is a personification of a reclaimed and softened 
nature and of the soft conditions of life in which we 
are nursed. My vision of nature as a person that 
night had no softness or beauty in it and was not 
woman. Standing on the hills I saw him coming up 
from the illimitable moaning sea, riding on the blast 
as on a chariot, and he was himself wind and cloud 
and sea and land. He towered above the granite 
hills, blotting out the stars with his streaming hair 
which covered the heavens like a cloud. I saw his 
face, dark as granite, as he rose up before me and 
passed over the stony desolate hills, and his eyes 
gazing straight before him were like two immense 
round shields of grey ice and had no speculation 
in them. This indeed was to my mind the most 
dreadful thing, that this being, all-powerful and ever- 
lasting, creator and slayer of all things that live, of 
all beauty and sweetness and compassion, was himself 
without knowledge or thought or emotion, and that 



238 THE LAND'S END 

that which he had made and would unmake was 
without significance to him. 

If there be nothing but this mechanical world, and 
if the pure materialist even in spite of his materialism 
should invent for himself or imagine a god, it would 
be such a one as I beheld on that windy night. 

So passed the miserable darkling hours, " as I lay 
a-thynkinge," and saw no hope until I slept, and when 
I woke and the grey morning was come, the wind had 
fallen and the cold was not so intense. 

The frost continued that day and the next, and 
although very cold with occasional storms of sleet 
and snow, it was getting milder all the time. The 
change was so gradual one could hardly feel it, but it 
had a great effect on the birds ; they were recovering 
very rapidly, and on the morning of the 27th, when 
the ground had once more grown soft except in shady 
places, my birds did not turn up at feeding-time in 
the morning : they were back in the fields getting 
their natural food, which no doubt tasted best after 
their long abstinence. It was a pleasure to go out 
again to see the thrush standing up stiff and alert on 
the green turf in the old way, and the speckled star- 
lings scattered about and once more busily prodding 
the turf. The daws rose up with the old insolent ring 
in their clamouring voices, and the wren was himself 
again, briskly hopping out of his hiding-place in the 
stones for a moment or two just to fling that sharp 
little note of indignation at you for disturbing him — 
" Go away — mind your own business ! " 

The mortality had undoubtedly been very great, 



A GREAT FROST 239 

but a majority of the birds died in the night-time, 
dropping from their perches in the close bushes and 
dying in holes in the hedges, where their bodies 
remained hidden. But they had died in the daytime 
too, and I found their remains all about the fields, 
mostly starlings, but dead redwings and thrushes 
were also plentiful. 




CHAPTER XVI 
A NATIVE NATURALIST 

The towans or sandhills — Their destructive progress over the land — 
Sea rush introduced — The ferry at Lelant — Among the towans 
— The meadow -pipit — The ferryman — Knowledge of wild life 
in country boys and men — Countryman and chaffinch — The 
native naturalist — A strange story of a badger — Great black- 
backed gull and young guillemot — Sparrow-hawk and curlew — 
Fight between a seal and a conger — Story of a young seal — An 
osprey — A great northern diver — The killing passion in sportsmen 
— Story of a meadow-pipit — The seal colony threatened. 



rn 



HE Towans, as the sandhills or dunes on the 
north-east side of St. Ives Bay are called — that 
barren place mentioned in the last chapter 
where a horde of fugitive thrushes found snails 
enough to save them from starving — is a curiously 
attractive bit of country. It is plainly visible from 
St. Ives, looking east over the water — a stretch of 
yellow sands where the Hayle River empties itself in 
the Bay, and, behind it, a grey-green desert of hum- 
mocky or hilly earth, where the hills are like huge 

240 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 241 

broken waves in " fluctuation fixed." And in a sense 
they are waves, formed of sand which the ocean 
brings out of its depths and exposes at low water, to 
be swept up by the everlasting winds and heaped in 
hills along the sea-front ; and no sooner are the hills 
built than the wind unbuilds them again, carrying the 
yellow dust further inland to build other hills and yet 
others, burying the green farm-lands and houses and 
entire villages in their desolating progress. This, they 
say, was the state of things no longer ago than the 
eighteenth century, when some wise person discovered 
or remembered that Nature herself has a remedy for 
this evil, a means of staying the wind-blown sands in 
their march. The common sea rush, Psamma arenaria^ 
the long coarse grass which grows on the sand by the 
sea, was introduced — the roots or seed, I do not know 
which ; and it grew and spread, and in a little while 
took complete possession of all that desolate strip of 
land, clothing the deep hollows and wave-like hills to 
their summits with its pale, sere-looking, grey-green 
tussocks. As you walk there, when the wind blows 
from the sea, the fine, dry, invisible particles rain on 
your face and sting your eyes ; but all this travelling 
sand comes from the beach and can do no harm, for 
where it falls it must lie and serve as food for the 
conquering sea rush. If you examine the earth you 
will find it bound down with a matting of tough roots 
and rootlets, and that in the spaces between the 
tussocks the decaying rush has formed a thin mould 
and is covered with mosses and lichens, and in many 
places with a turf as on the chalk downs. 



242 THE LAND'S END 

The Towans occupy the ground on both sides of 
the estuary. On the south side is the ancient village 
of Lelant, once threatened with destruction by the 
shifting sands ; now the square old church tower, as 
you approach it from St. Ives, is seen standing bravely 
above the rush-grown hills and hummocks made 
harmless for ever. On the north side of the estuary 
is Hayle, a small decayed town, and the ancient 
village and church of Phillack, and behind the village 
to the sea and on either hand miles upon miles of 
towans. There is a ferry at Lelant, and the ferryman 
has his little ramshackle hut at the foot of a sandhill, 
a little below the church, and here I often came to be 
rowed over to the other side, where it was wilder and 
more solitary. There I could spend hours at a stretch 
without seeing a human being or hearing any sound 
of human life. From the top of a high towan I 
could get a fine view of the Bay, with St. Ives' little 
town and rocky island on the further side ; while 
looking along the coastline on the right hand, the 
white tower of Godrevy Lighthouse on its rock was 
seen at the end of the Bay, and beyond it the blue 
Atlantic. Coming down from my look-out all the 
wide exhilarating prospect would vanish — ocean and 
Bay and distant town, with cliffs and hills — and I 
would be in another world, walking on the soft sand 
and moss in hollow places among the tall sere rushes 
with their old bleached seed spikes. " They have no 
song the sedges dry," sings the poet, but in his 
heart, he adds, they touched a string and for him 
they had a song. So it was with these dry rushes ; 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 243 

they touched a string in me, and that low, rustling, 
sibilant sound, and mysterious whispering which the 
wind made in them, was to me a song. There was 
not even a bird voice to break the silence, except 
when I disturbed a meadow-pipit and it rose and flew 
to this side and that in its usual uncertain way, utter- 
ing its sharp, thin, melancholy note of alarm — a sound 
which serves to intensify the feeling of wildness and 
to give an expression to earth in lonely desert places. 
In my visits to the Towans I had a double motive 
and pleasure : one in communing with nature in that 
" empty and solitary place," the other in talking with 
the ferryman who took me to and fro across the river: 
he was a native of the place, a pure Cornishman in 
appearance and disposition, and a naturalist. I do not 
say a " born naturalist " because I fancy we are most 
of us that, and yet the countryman who is a naturalist 
is a rarity. As a rule, what he knows about nature 
and wild life is the little that survives in his memory 
of all he learnt in his boyhood. He learns a good deal 
then, when the mind is fresh, the senses keen and the 
ancient hunting and exploring instincts most active. 
In woods and wilds the naked savage ran, and the 
civilised boy still preserves the old tradition, and as 
he runs he picks up a good deal of knowledge which 
will be of no use to him. If he is a country boy of 
the labouring class he no sooner arrives at an age to 
leave school and idling and do something for a living 
than the change begins— a change which is like a 
metamorphosis. However small a part he is called 
on to fill, though he be but a carter's boy, it serves to 



244 THE LAND'S END 

open a new prospect to his mind, and to give him a 
new and absorbing interest in life. His work is the 
most important thing in the world : he ponders on it, 
and on the money it brings him ; on the tremendous 
question of food and clothing and shelter ; and by 
and by on love and marriage and children to follow ; 
on the struggle to live and the great difference that 
a shilling or two more or less per week will be to 
him. One effect of all this is to make the interests 
and occupations of his early years appear trivial ; 
his days with wild nature were all idle and useless 
and the knowledge of animal life he acquired of as 
little consequence as that of the old boyish games. 
The country youth would perhaps be astonished if 
he could be conscious of the change going on in him, 
or if some one were to tell him that the mental 
images of things seen and heard in nature will soon 
grow dim and eventually fade out of his mind. It 
is really surprising to find how far this dimming and 
obliterating process will go ; for here (let us say) is a 
man whose whole life is passed amidst the same rural 
scenes, who has seen and heard the same bird forms 
and sounds from infancy, who knew them all as inti- 
mately as he knew his mother's face and voice in his 
early years, and yet he has ceased to know them ! 
All because he has not renewed or refreshed the early 
images ; because his mind has been occupied with 
other things exclusively, and his faculty of observation, 
with regard to nature at all events, has practically 
ceased to exist. 

An amusing instance of this state of mind occurs 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 245 

to me here. I was staying in a small rustic village 
in the cottage of one of the most interesting men I 
have met. He was a working man, better educated 
than most of his class, and at the age of sixty-five 
had saved enough to buy a plot of ground and build 
himself a little house with his own hands in which to 
spend the remnant of his life without further labour. 
But he was of an active mind and an enthusiast in- 
flamed with one great idea and hope, which was to raise 
the people of his own class to a better position and a 
higher life — morally and intellectually — to make them, 
in fact, as sober, righteous, independent and wise as he 
was himself. And as he was a man of character and cour- 
age, and gifted with a kind of eloquence, he had come 
to be very widely known and greatly respected ; he had 
even been led to fight a hard fight in a populous 
borough as a Labour candidate for Parliament. He 
had lost but was not in the least soured by defeat 
and was still a leader of men, a sort of guide, philo- 
sopher and friend to very many of his own class, 
especially in matters political. Finally, he was a man 
of a noble presence, large and powerfully built, with 
a genial open countenance and a magnificent white 
beard — a sort of Walt Whitman both in appearance 
and temper of mind, his love of humanity, his toler- 
ance and above all his unshakable faith in a glorious 
democracy. 

All this about my leader of working men has 
nothing to do with the subject under discussion, but 
I could not resist the temptation of giving a portrait 
of the man. 



246 THE LAND'S END 

One bright spring day I was with him, pacing his 
garden walk, discussing a variety of important matters 
relating to man's spiritual nature, and so forth, when 
by and by we drifted into other themes — wild nature, 
and then wild bird life. " There is," he said, " one 
curious thing about birds in which they differ from 
other creatures and which makes them a little more 
puzzling to a man with just the ordinary knowledge 
of nature. They have wings to carry them about 
and they roam from place to place so that at any 
moment a man may be confronted with a bird of a 
perfectly unfamiliar appearance. Or he may hear a 
cry or song which he has never heard before, and in 
such a case he can only say that the bird must be a 
stranger in that locality — a wanderer from some dis- 
tant place. But one would always like to know what 
the bird is ; it adds to the interest, and I have very 
often wished when seeing or hearing some such strange 
bird that some one like yourself, with an intimate 
knowledge of all the species in our country, had been 
with me to satisfy my curiosity." 

Just as he was finishing a chaffinch flew down and 
vanished into the dense foliage of a young horse- 
chestnut tree growing a dozen yards from where we 
stood, and no sooner had it come down than it burst 
out in its familiar loud ringing lyric. 

He started round and held up his hand. " There ! " 
he exclaimed when the bird ended his song. " A case 
in point ! Now can you tell me what bird was that?" 

"A chaffinch," I said. 

He looked sharply, almost resentfully, at me, think- 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 247 

ing it a poor joke on my part, and when I smiled at 
his expression he was more put out than ever. But I 
could not help admiring him as he stood there staring 
into my face. He had put down his spade when our 
talk began ; his coat was off, his cloudy old brown 
waistcoat unbuttoned, his blue cotton shirt-sleeves 
rolled up to the elbows, his hands and arms smeared 
with dried clay — a grand figure of a man with the 
white beard mixed with a little red falling to his 
waist, his grey old shapeless felt hat thrust back on 
his head and his long hair down to his shoulders. 

He assured me with dignity that if there was a 
bird he was familiar with it was the chaffinch, that as 
a person born and bred in the country he could not 
make a mistake about such a bird. Nevertheless, I 
returned, the bird we had heard was a chaffinch, and 
familiar as he was with such a bird he could not put 
his knowledge against mine in such a case. He 
assented but still felt dissatisfied. " You will allow, I 
suppose," he said, " that there are great differences 
in individual singers and that some one bird may be 
so different from the generality as to deceive one who 
is not an ornithologist as to its species." 

He was right there, I said, and that consoled him, 
and he concluded that this particular bird had uttered 
an unusual sort of song which no person, not a 
trained naturalist, would have identified as that of a 
chaffinch. 

It was not so, but I let it pass, and he was glad to 
get back to other higher subjects where he was, so to 
speak, on his native heath and could be my guide. 



248 THE LAND'S END 

This may appear an extreme case : I do not think 
so : I have conversed about the creatures with too 
many rustics and country people of all denominations 
to think it anything out of the common — scores and 
hundreds of rustics all over the country, and if J 
want to hear something fresh and interesting I go to 
the boy and not to his stolid father, or hoary-headed 
less stolid grandfather, who have both pretty well for- 
gotten all they once knew. 

Of course there are exceptions, especially among 
gamekeepers, although in a majority of cases their 
observation is of that baser kind which concerns itself 
solely with the things that profit. But there is also 
the nobler kind of observer, the one in a thousand 
whose keen boyish interest in all living things is not 
lost when he is called on to take a part in the serious 
business of life. Ceasing to be a boy he does not 
put away this boyish thing, this secret delight in 
nature which others outlive. It is in him like the 
memory of a first love, the image of a vanished form 
which endures in the mind to extreme old age and out- 
lasts and has a lustre beyond all others. It is this 
surviving feeling of the boy which makes the native 
naturalist, the man with keen observant eye and 
retentive memory ; and however illiterate he may be, 
or unsocial in disposition, or uncouth or repellent in 
manners, it is always a delight to meet him, to conquer 
his rudeness or reserve and to listen to the strange 
experiences garnered in his memory. 

In the chapter on Cornish imagination something 
was said about the actions of animals, even of those 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 249 

we are most familiar with, which come as a great sur- 
prise, and I gave an account of one — an incident I wit- 
nessed of a rock-pipit which, caught by a violent gust 
of wind just at the moment when its wings being set 
for the gliding descent to earth could not be used to 
resist the current, was blown away into the midst 
of a band of hovering herring gulls and very nearly 
lost its life. One knows that one will never witness 
just such an incident again, but there will be others 
equally unexpected and strange for the watcher. In 
the course of this book I have related a few : one of 
a gannet falling from a great height like a stone into 
the sea just by the side of a herring gull floating on 
the surface, and one of a fox, standing like a carved 
figure on a big rock, savagely attacked by a raven and 
refusing to be driven from its stand. 

Here I cannot resist the temptation to introduce 
an incident of this kind, but far more wonderful than 
any one I have related in this or any other book, 
which was witnessed not by a naturalist but an artist, 
my friend Mr. R. H. Carter, of the Land's End. He 
was with his friend, the late Rev. F. C. Jackson, Rector 
of Stanmore, who used to take his holidays in West 
Cornwall and was himself something of an artist. 
They were sketching one day on the huge cliffs of 
Tol-Pedn-Penwith, near the Land's End, when Mr. 
Carter noticed that some animal had been recently 
scratching the earth at the foot of a huge pile of 
rocks near where he was sitting. There was a large 
hollow place under the rock into which one could see, 
as there was an opening on a level with the ground 



250 THE LAND'S END 

on one side, and it struck him that a badger had 
taken refuge in this cavity, and had been obliged to 
scratch a little earth away to squeeze his body in. 
He called his companion's attention to it, and get- 
ting down on the turf and lying flat so as to bring 
their eyes on to a level with the floor they gazed 
into the cavity. They could see no animal, but the 
light was dim inside, and Mr. Jackson proceeded to 
twist up half a dozen wax matches into a small com- 
pact ball, which he lighted and then carefully pushed 
in right to the middle of the hollow space. The 
burning wax made a good light, but still they could 
see no creature, only at one side, a foot or so from 
the light, there was a dark patch which they could 
not make out ; it was, they imagined, a hole in the 
rock which showed black. Presently, as they gazed 
in, still trying to penetrate into that dark hole with 
their sight, a paw was seen to emerge and move 
towards the light until the whole foreleg of a badger 
was revealed ; then the paw scraped up a little loose 
soil from the floor and carefully drew or jerked it 
over the burning ball of wax and put the light out. 

They had both witnessed the whole action, and by 
and by with a long stick or pole they succeeded in 
ousting the badger from his niche in the little cave. 
Had they not done so the sceptical reader might 
have said that what they had seen was an illusion — 
that they were looking for a badger and expecting to 
see one and had badger on the brain so to speak ; 
and by and by when a slight moving shadow caused 
by the flickering flame made its appearance it took the 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 251 

form of a badger's paw and leg in their sight, and 
when the flame expired they imagined that the illusory- 
paw had extinguished it. I dare say that if such an 
incident had been related by the Canadian, Charles 
Roberts, or by any of the writers of the " new or 
romantic school" of natural history in America, it 
would be set down by most readers as an unusually 
wild invention of the author. 

The ferryman had no such wonderful story to tell 
when we compared notes, and I intend here to relate 
only a few of the curious incidents he had witnessed, 
and this mainly for a purpose of my own. They 
were mostly little tragedies. 

One summer day when he was out in his boat 
fishing for pollack at his favourite ground a mile or 
two beyond the Godrevy Lighthouse he noticed three 
guillemots near him, one old bird with its half-grown 
young one, and a second young bird which accom- 
panied the others but kept at a little distance from 
them. This young guillemot had doubtless been lost 
or left by its parents. There was no other bird in 
sight except a great black-backed gull, flying idly 
about, now making a wide circle and occasionally 
dropping on to the water to examine some small 
floating object, then flying off again. He appeared 
to pay no attention to the guillemots, nor they to 
him, and it therefore came as a great surprise when 
all at once in passing over the three birds he dropped 
down upon the second young guillemot and seized it 
before it had time to dive. The captive struggled in 
vain, sending forth its shrill cries for help far and 



252 THE LAND'S END 

wide over the still sea, while the great gull, sitting on 
the surface, proceeded in a leisurely manner to de- 
spatch and then devour his victim, tearing it to pieces 
with his big powerful yellow beak. 

He told me of several other little tragedies of the 
kind which he had witnessed with surprise, one of 
a curlew which at the moment of flying past him was 
suddenly chased by a sparrow-hawk and pressed so 
hard that it dashed down to the beach, where it was 
instantly grappled. The ferryman made all haste to 
the spot, and the hawk flew off at his approach, 
leaving the curlew dead and bleeding on the sands. 
He picked it up and took it home to eat it himself. 
But of all these cases the one of the great black- 
backed gull impressed him the most on account of the 
casual way in which it came about, just as if the gull 
had been taken by a sudden impulse to drop upon 
and slaughter the young guillemot. Such an incident 
serves to show how perilous a world the wild creature 
exists in and on how small a matter its safety often 
depends, and it also gives the idea of an almost un- 
canny intelligence in the birds that live by violence. 
No doubt the gull was tempted to fall on that young 
bird solely because of its keeping a little apart from 
the other two, because it had no parent of its own to 
protect it. 

The rocks to the north of St. Ives Bay are an ancient 
haunt of the common seal, one of the few colonies of 
this animal now left on the south coast of Britain. 
The ferryman was one day fishing in his boat at this 
point close to the mouth of that vast cavern in the 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 253 

rocks where the seals have their home, when a loud 
king cry or roar made him jump in his boat, and 
looking round he caught sight of a seal thrusting his 
head and half his body out of the water with a conger 
about seven to eight feet long fastened to his ear. 
The blood was streaming from the seal's head and he 
was trying to shake his enemy off and at the same 
time turning round and round in his efforts to bite 
the conger ; but the black serpentine body wriggled 
and floated out of his reach, and in a very few 
moments they went down. Again and again they 
rose, the seal coming out each time with the same 
savage cry, shaking himself and biting, the conger 
still holding on with bull-dog tenacity. But on the 
last occasion there was no cry and commotion ; the 
conger had lost his hold and the seal had him by 
the middle of the body in his jaws. On coming up 
he swam quietly to the sloping rock close by, and 
half in, half out of the water began tearing up 
and devouring his victim, the blood still running from 
his own head. 

He had another seal story which interested me even 
more than the last, since the chief actor and conqueror 
in this instance was the nobler animal man, the seal 
beino; the victim. 

In the early autumn of 1907 there were mighty 
winds on this coast, with tremendous seas and very 
high tides, which made it impossible to use the ferry ; 
but when the weather moderated and the ferry- 
man took to his boat once more he came upon a 
young seal, which had, no doubt, taken refuge in the 



254 THE LAND'S END 

Hayle estuary and was lost from its parents. The 
days went by and it did not leave the river : the 
mother seal had not found it, and apparently the 
poor young thing had no sure instinct to guide it 
across St. Ives Bay to the seal caverns in the cliffs 
to the north of the lighthouse, which was probably its 
birthplace. And probably rinding itself very lonely 
in the estuary, it came by and by to look on the 
man in the boat, who was always there, as a sort 
of companion — perhaps as a seal of curious habits, 
which looked a little like an adult seal, but pro- 
gressed in a somewhat different manner, keeping 
always to the surface of the water and swimming 
with the aid of two long wing-like fins. But it 
appeared to be a good-natured seal, and always re- 
garded the orphaned youngster with a mild and wel- 
coming expression. First it watched the ferryman 
from a little distance, then approached him every time 
he appeared, then began to follow, coming nearer and 
nearer, and would swim behind the boat, quite close, 
just as a spaniel or other water-loving dog will swim 
after its master's boat. 

This was a delightful experience to the ferryman, 
and the sight of the dog-like creature swimming after 
the boat was also an entertainment to the passengers 
and a cause of surprise to many. But there was 
nothing remarkable in its action ; the seal, like the 
dog, is a social creature ; it is well known that he 
readily grows tame towards, and even attached to, 
the human beings he is accustomed to see who do 
not persecute him. The old Cornish author, Borlase, 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 255 

refers to this character of the seal, which he classes 
with his " Quadruped Reptiles," in the following 
quaint passage : " Whether it is delighted with music 
or any land voice, or whether it is to alleviate the 
toil of swimming, it shows itself almost wholly above 
the water frequently, or near the shore, ibid. Add to 
this that the great docility of the creature (little short 
of that of the human species) and his being so easily 
trained to be familiar with and obedient to man, may 
make us with some grounds conclude, that this is 
the creature to which imagination has given the shape 
of half-fish half-man, a shape nowhere else to be 
found." 

The estuary attracts a good number of wild fowl, 
duck and shore birds, in winter, and as a consequence 
is much frequented by sportsmen. One day the 
ferryman took one of these gentlemen, a visitor from 
a distance, across the river, and was not half-way 
over before the seal appeared as usual and with its 
head well up swam after the boat, and gaining quickly 
on it was soon not more than an oar's length from 
the stern. The ferryman, looking back, was watching 
it, and by and by, thinking it would be a pleasant 
surprise to the other, he remarked, " My baby seal is 
just behind you, coming after us." The other looked 
around, and instantly, before the boatman could cry 
out or even divine his intention, threw up his 
gun and fired and the brains of the young seal were 
scattered on the water. " You have killed my pet 
seal — the animal I loved best," the boatman cried, 
and the other was surprised and expressed regret. 



256 THE LAND'S END 

He wished he had known it was a pet seal ; he 
wouldn't have killed it, no, not for anything, if he 
had only known. And why had he not been warned ? 
and so on, until he stepped out of the boat and went 
his way with his gun. 

He had not been warned because in spite of all 
the ferryman had seen of sportsmen and their ways 
he never imagined that any one would have done so 
brutal a thing or that the murderous shot would have 
been fired so quickly. 

He also told me about an osprey which appeared 
one autumn at the estuary. It was the first bird of 
its species he had ever seen, and when it first appeared, 
flying high in the air and hovering directly over his 
hut where he kept a number of fowls and turkeys, 
he became alarmed for their safety, thinking it was a 
kite or other large destructive hawk. By and by 
the strange bird sailed away and began circling above 
the water, coming lower down, then after hovering at 
one spot like a kestrel for some moments he saw it 
drop into the water and rise with a good-sized fish in 
its talons. Then he knew that the strange big hawk 
was the famous osprey. 

For some days it displayed its magnificent powers 
to all who came to the water-side, exciting a great 
deal of interest ; then one of the sporting gentlemen 
succeeded in getting a shot at it and wounding it 
badly. But it did not drop ; it was watched flying 
laboriously away over the moor until out of sight 
and was never seen again. 

Another season he had a great northern diver in 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 257 

the river, and this bird after a week or ten days lost 
its wildness and took no notice of the ferryman, 
although he sometimes rowed his boat to within forty 
yards of it to watch its movements when it was fish- 
ing. The sportsmen he ferried across wanted to 
shoot the diver, but he prevented them. Then one 
gentleman told him that he would hire a boat and go 
out and shoot it, in spite of him. He said that a bird 
so destructive to fish should not be allowed to live in 
the river. The ferryman said he would prove to 
him that the diver was doing no harm, and rowing 
him out to where the bird was diving at its usual 
feeding-ground they watched, and presently saw it 
come up with a small green crab in its beak. The 
sportsman was convinced that the bird was not taking 
fish, and gave his promise that he would not shoot it. 
However, a day or two later it was shot at by one of 
the sportsmen and badly wounded in the side, and from 
that time the sight of it was a constant pain to him as 
it moved continually round and round in a circle when 
attempting to swim and was hardly able to dive. 
Finally he took his gun and put it out of its misery. 

The young seal, the osprey, the great northern 
diver were but a few of the creatures he told me of, 
which, when living, were a source of delight to every 
one who watched them, whose lives had been wan- 
tonly taken in the estuary by gentlemen sportsmen. 
Stories equally sad and shocking were told me by 
other lovers of nature and observers of wild life at 
other points on the coast, of how every rare and 
beautiful species, every owl, buzzard, harrier, chough, 



258 THE LAND'S END 

hoopoe and many other species, had been slaughtered 
by men who call themselves sportsmen and gentle- 
men. How is one to explain such a thing — this base 
destructive passion — unless it be that the gentleman, 
like the gamekeeper, cannot escape the reflex effect 
on his mind of the gun in his hand ? He too has 
grown incapable of pleasure in any rare or noble or 
beautiful form of life until he has it in his hands — 
until he has exercised his awful power and blotted 
out its existence. And how hard of heart the exercise 
has made him ! 

One afternoon at Wells-by-the-Sea I entered into 
conversation with a sportsman I found sitting on a 
grassy slope, where he was waiting for the wild geese 
which would come in by and by from feeding to 
roost on the sand spit outside. He was, physically, 
a very fine fellow in his prime, tall, athletic-looking, 
with a handsome typical English face of that hard 
colour which comes of an open-air life, with the 
hard keen eyes so often seen in the sportsman. 
Talking with him 1 discovered that he was also a 
man of culture, a great traveller, a reader and a col- 
lector of rare and costly books on certain subjects, 
especially on the forms of sport he loved best. It 
was impossible for me not to admire him as he 
sat there reclining idly on his rug, thrown on the 
green slope, smoking his pipe, his gun lying across 
his knees, his big black curly -haired retriever 
stretched out at his side. And at intervals, as we 
talked, a little meadow-pipit, the only other living 
creature near us, flitted out of the grass and, rising to 



A NATIVE NATURALIST 259 

a height of twenty or thirty feet, hovered over the 
still water beneath, as if to get a better view of us, 
to find out what we were doing there ; and as it 
hovered before us it emitted those sharp, sorrowful 
little call-notes which have such a charm for me. And 
every time the small bird rose and hovered before us 
the dog raised his head and watched it excitedly, then 
looked up into his master's face. Then the little 
thing with an anxious mind would drop back on the 
turf again and go on seeking its food as before, so 
near to us that we could distinctly see its bright eyes 
and thin little pale brown legs and all the markings 
and shadings of its pretty winter plumage — the olive- 
browns and dull blacks, the whites and the cream 
faintly tinged with buff on the striped breast. 

By and by I got up and strolled away to the dunes 
on the sea-front, and when I had gone about seventy 
or eighty yards a shot rang out behind me. Glancing 
back I saw that the sportsman had also got up and 
was now walking to a point among the dunes where 
he had planned to lie in wait for the geese. The 
retriever was some distance behind, playing with 
something ; and then, instead of following his master, 
he came on to me, and seeing that he was carrying 
something I stooped down and drew it from his 
mouth. It was the titling — the little meadow-pipit ; 
its anxious little question and challenge had been 
answered with an idle charge of shot when it flew up 
and hovered before the man with a gun. 

I suppose that his motive, if he had one, was to 
give his dog a few minutes' amusement in retrieving 



26o THE LAND'S END 

the shattered little bird from the water and in playing 
with and carrying it. But if I had gone to him and 
demanded to know why he had taken that happy little 
life, which was sacred to me, I think his answer, if he 
had condescended to make one, would have been very 
contemptuous — I think he would have said that he 
perceived me to be a sentimentalist and that he 
declined to say anything to a person of that sort. 

There are not, I imagine, many men of so fine a 
temper of mind as to escape this hardening effect of 
the gun in the hand. 

In conclusion of this chapter I will go back to the 
subject of the Cornish seals of that small surviving 
colony which has its ancestral home in the caves out- 
side the Bay of St. Ives. Sportsmen occasionally 
shoot them just for the pleasure of the thing, but the 
fishermen of St. Ives do not consider that they suffer 
any injury from the animals and have consequently 
refrained from persecuting them. Unhappily they 
are now threatened with extermination from a new 
quarter : the students at the Camborne Mining School 
have recently found out a new and pleasant pastime, 
which is to seat themselves with rifle or fowling-piece 
on the cliff" and watch for the appearance of a brown 
head above the water below of a seal going out of or 
coming in to the caves and letting fly at it. When 
they hit the seal it sinks and is seen no more, but the 
animal is not wanted, the object is to shoot it, and 
this accomplished the sportsman goes back happy and 
proud at his success in having murdered so large and 
human-like a creature. 




CHAPTER XVII 
THE COMING OF SPRING 

Spring in winter — John Cocking — Antics and love-flights of the 
shag — Herring gull mocked by a jackdaw — Migrating sea-birds 
— Departure of winter visitors — Appearance of the wheatear — 
Resident songsters — The frogs' carnival — A Dominican adder 
— Willow-wren and chiffchaff — Nesting birds and washing-day 
— A merciful woman — Pied wagtails in a quarry — Boys and 
robins. 

AFTER the frost described two chapters back, the 
J\ change to the normal winter temperature was 
so great as to make it seem like spring before 
the end of January. When spring does come to 
England, known to all by many welcome signs, it 
makes but a very slight difference in this West 
Cornwall district and is hardly recognised. For 
more than half the year, from October to May, 
it is comparatively a verdureless and flowerless land, 
dark with furze and grey with rocks and heather, 
splashed with brown-red of dead bracken. Not till 

261 



262 THE LAND'S END 

the end of May will the bracken live again and 
make the rough wilderness green, and not till July 
will the dead-looking heath have its flush of purple 
colour. Nevertheless, from autumn onwards the 
sense of spring in the earth is never long absent. 
It rains and rains ; sea-mists come up and blot out 
the sight of all things, and the wind raves everlast- 
ingly, and, finally, there may be a spell of frost or 
a fall of snow ; but through it all, at very frequent 
intervals, the subtle influence, the " ethereal mild- 
ness," make^ itself felt. It is as if the sweet season 
had never really forsaken this end of all the land, 
following the receding sun, but rather as if it had 
retired with the adder and the mother bumble-bee 
into some secret hiding-place to sleep a little while 
and wake as often as the rain ceased and the wind 
grew still to steal forth and give a mysterious gladness 
to the air. It is felt even more by the wild creatures 
than by man, and I think that John Cocking is one of 
the first to show it, for by mid-January he has got 
himself a curly crest and a new spirit. 

John Cocking is the local name of the shag, the 
commonest species of cormorant on thr coast, a big, 
heavy, ungainly-looking creature, the ugliest fowl in 
Britain, half bird and half reptile in appearance on 
the water, where he spends half his time greedily 
devouring fish and the other half sitting on the rocks 
digesting his food and airing his wings. It is hard to 
imagine any softening or beautifying change in such 
a being, and indeed the only alteration to be observed 
in him at first is that he begins to pay some attention 



THE COMING OF SPRING 263 

to his fellow shags and to find out occasion to quarrel 
with them. I watched the behaviour of one, a tyrant 
and hooligan, at Gurnard's Head, at a spot where 
a mass of rocks overlooking the sea has one perfectly 
flat stone on the top. This stone was a favourite 
standing-place of the shags on account of its position 
and flat surface, and it afforded space enough to 
accommodate a score or more birds. The bird I 
watched had placed himself in the centre of the flat 
rock and would not allow another to share it with 
him. At intervals of a few minutes a cormorant 
coming up from the sea would settle on it, as 
he had always or for a long time been accustomed 
to do, whereupon the John Cocking in possession 
would twist his snaky head round and glare at him 
with his malignant emerald-green eyes. If this pro- 
duced no effect he would open wide his beak and dart 
his head out towards the intruder just as an irritated 
adder lunges at you when you are out of his reach. 
Then, if the new-comer still refused to quit, he would 
pull himself up erect and hurl his heavy body against 
the other and send him flying off the rock. The 
ejected one would then either fly away or find himself 
a place on the sloping rock among the nine or ten 
others who had been treated in the same way. Mean- 
while the ruffian himself would go back to the middle 
of the stone platform, holding his tail stuck up verti- 
cally like a staff and turn himself about this way and 
that as if asking the whole company if there was 
any other Johnny there who would like to try conclu- 
sions with him. 



264 THE LAND'S END 

The softening of the ugly bird comes a little later 
when the hooligan has got a mate and both are half 
beside themselves with joy which they express by 
rubbing their snaky necks together, crossing and see- 
sawing them, first on one side then the other, like knife 
and steel in the butcher's hands. When the nesting- 
site has been chosen, John Cocking is seen at his best, 
playing the attentive young husband ; he visits her 
twenty times an hour, always with something in his 
beak, a bit of seaweed or a stick, just because he 
must give her something, and she takes it from him 
and bows this way and that and puts it down and 
takes it up again, and out of her overflowing affection 
gives it back to him — " Dear, you must not be so 
generous ! " And he flies away with it again just 
to have an excuse to fly back the next minute 
and insist on her accepting it. The great change, 
greater even than his new charming manner to- 
wards his mate, is in his flight on quitting the 
nesting-place : he flies and returns, and passes and 
repasses before her, and alights on the rock for a 
moment and then off again — all to exhibit his grace, 
his imitation of the love-flight of the cushat and 
turtle-dove. The curious thing is that so heavy and 
ungainly a creature, with such a laboured flight at 
other times, does succeed fairly well, as if that new 
fire in him had made him lighter, more volatile and 
like the white-winged birds about him. 

The cormorants are the earliest breeders, excepting 
the ravens, now so much persecuted by the injurious 
idiots and Philistines who call themselves collectors 



THE COMING OF SPRING 265 

and naturalists that they rarely succeed in rearing 
their young ; and the next to follow are the herring 
gulls. The gull fixes on a site for his nest, but long 
before building begins he appears anxious to let all 
his neighbours know that this particular spot is his 
very own and that he looks on their approach with 
jealous eyes. Not green eyes like the cormorant's, 
but of a very pure luminous yellow like the vivid 
eyes of a harrier hawk, or some brilliant yellow gem, 
or like the glazed petal of a buttercup lit by a sun- 
beam. His gull neighbours respect his rights, but 
the jackdaws mock at his feeling of proprietorship 
and amuse themselves very much at his expense. 

One day I watched a pair of gulls on a rock they 
had recently taken possession of — a large mass of 
granite thrust out from the cliff over the sea. The 
female was reposing at the spot where it was intended 
the nest should be, while the male kept guard, walk- 
ing proudly about on his little domain, now turning 
an eye up to watch the birds flying overhead, then 
stooping to pick up a pebble to hold it a few moments 
in his bill and drop it again, and then marching up to 
his mate, whereupon they would open wide their 
yellow beaks, stretch out their necks and join their 
voices in a loud triumphant chant. "Here we are," he 
appeared to be saying, " established on our own rock, 
which belongs exclusively to us with everything on it, 
even to the smallest pebble and to every leaf and 
flower of the thrift and sea-campion growing on it. 
Not a bird of them all will venture to alight on this rock. 
Come now, stand up and let us shout together ! " 



266 THE LAND'S END 

And shout they did, their loudest, and in the 
middle of their shouting performance a jackdaw, 
detaching himself from a company of thirty or forty 
birds wheeling about overhead, dropped plump down 
on to the rock. Instantly the gull dashed at and 
drove him away, but no sooner was he back on his 
rock than he found the daw back too, and had to 
hunt him away again, and then again to the ninth 
time. And at last when he had been mocked nine 
times he became furious and set himself to give the 
insolent daw a lesson he would not forget : over the 
sea and land and along the face of the cliff he chased 
him, and up into the sky they rose and down again, 
the daw at his greatest speed, the pursuer screaming 
with wrath close behind him, but he could not catch 
or hurt him, and at last giving up the chase returned 
to alight once more on his rock. But the daw had 
followed him back, and no sooner had the gull folded 
his wings than down on the rock he dropped once 
more and sat there, a picture of impudence, eyeing 
the other's movements with his little white mocking 
eyes. What will happen now ? I asked myself. But 
the gull was not going to be made a fool of any 
more ; he put up with the insult, and after two or 
three minutes, finding he was to have no more fun, 
the daw flew off to rejoin his companions. 

Sea-birds, visible from the headlands, are common 
enough throughout the cold season, but after mid- 
winter their numbers increase, until at last you may 
see the travellers passing by in small flocks of a dozen 
to a hundred or even two hundred birds, almost 



THE COMING OF SPRING 267 

every day and often all day long, flock succeeding 
flock as if they were all keeping in a line — puffins, 
razorbills, guillemots — flying low on rapidly-beating 
wings, their bodies showing black and white just 
above the rough surface of the sea. More interesting 
than these in appearance are those dusky-winged 
swifts of the ocean, the shearwaters, travellers the 
same way, not in flocks but singly and in twos and 
threes and sometimes as many as half a dozen, all 
keeping wide apart, searching the sea as they go, 
moving very swiftly above the water in a series of 
wide curves looking like shadows of birds passing, 
invisible, far up in the sky. Sometimes they seemed 
like shadows, and sometimes I imagined them to be 
the ghosts of those pelagic birds which had recently 
died in all the seas which flow round the world, 
travelling by some way mysteriously known to them 
to their ultimate bourne in the furthest north, beyond 
the illimitable fields of ice where, according to Court- 
hope, dead birds have their paradise. 

While this migration is visibly going on at sea 
another is in progress all over the land which is not 
seen or not noticed, and this is the departure of visi- 
tants from the northern parts of Britain which have 
been wintering in Cornwall. From day to day their 
numbers diminish imperceptibly — first fieldfares and 
redwings ; then starlings, thrushes, larks, pipits, wag- 
tails and some other species which come in smaller 
numbers. By the end of February or quite early in 
March the winter visitors, British and foreign, have 
all slipped quietly away, their eastward movement 



268 THE LAND'S END 

unmarked, and still no new bird from oversea has 
come to take their place. Then, one day in March 
when the sun shines, as you stroll by the sea, sud- 
denly a flash of white comes before you at a dis- 
tance of forty or fifty yards and you see your first 
wheatear, or whitaker as the natives call him, back 
in his old home among the rocks. And as he is 
the first to come you think him the most beautiful 
bird in the world in his chaste and delicate dress of 
black and white and buff" and clear blue-grey. And 
so when you first hear him uttering his wild brief 
warble, as he flutters in the air in appearance a great 
black and white butterfly, you think that no sound 
can compare with it in exquisite purity and sweetness. 
Away from the sea you will hear no spring bird ; 
the only songs are of the resident species which you 
have heard at intervals throughout the winter — robin 
and wren and dunnock and lark and corn bunting. 
The only new song — if song it may be called — is not 
uttered by a bird at all, although it often has a curi- 
ously bird-like musical tinkle. You begin to hear 
it as you ramble among the furze thickets in the 
neighbourhood of some hidden stream — a succes- 
sion of chirping and croaking sounds in various keys, 
and sounds like the craking of corncrakes, and at 
intervals the little musical sounds as of birds and of 
running water. The frogs are having their grand 
annual carnival, and when seen congregated at the 
water-courses, it is strange to think they should be 
so abundant in this stony district overgrown with 
harsh furze, ling and bracken. You have perhaps 



THE COMING OF SPRING 269 

spent months in the place without seeing a frog, now 
following the stream you could count hundreds at 
their revels in the water, brown and olive frogs, clay 
colour, yellow and old gold, and some strangely 
marked with black and brown on a pale ground. 
These congregations which begin to form before 
March are continued until May. 

Adders, seen occasionally on warm days in Febru- 
ary, are common enough in March and April if one 
knows how to find them. Here, at two spots within 
half a mile of each other, I found two of the most 
singular and beautifully coloured adders I had ever 
seen. One was of so pale a grey in its ground colour 
as to appear white at a little distance ; the other was 
perfectly white, the zigzag band intensely black with 
a narrow border of delicate buff. I turned him over 
expecting to find some curious variation in the colour 
of the belly, and was disappointed to find it the usual 
dark blue ; but I was so charmed with this rare 
Dominican adder that I kept it half an hour, carrying 
it to a piece of level green turf for the pleasure of 
watching the sinuous movements of so strange a 
serpent over the ground before I finally let it go into 
hiding among the bushes. 

After you have seen and heard the wheatears you 
begin to listen in the furze and thorn grown bottoms 
for that bright, airy, tender, running, rippling little 
melody of the willow-wren, which should come next, 
and is so universal in England, and it will surprise 
you to hear the chiffchaff before him, for in this 
treeless district the species so abundant everywhere 



270 THE LAND'S END 

else is comparatively rare, while the local chiffchaff is 
exceedingly common. 

Before the earliest summer migrants are heard 
some of the resident species are breeding, not only 
on the cliffs, but the small birds in the bushes- 
thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens and others. 
I was surprised to find that clothes-drying was a very 
serious trouble to these bush-breeders where there are 
no trees. Monday is washing-day at the farms and 
cottages, and it is usual to use the stone hedges 
covered with their luxuriant crop of furze as a 
drying-place. Looking over the land from some 
elevated place you see the gleam of white linen far 
and near as of hedges covered with snow. Passing 
one of these hedges one evening I found a gather- 
ing of about a dozen blackbirds in a state of great 
excitement, hopping and flying up and down, chuck- 
ling and screaming before the white sheets and 
counterpanes covering some of the large round bushes. 
Poor birds ! it was late in the day and they were 
getting desperate, since if these hateful white cover- 
ings were not removed soon so as to let them 
return to their nests their eggs would be chilled beyond 
hope. Some of the birds care as little for the cover- 
ing sheet as rooks and jackdaws do for the grotesque 
imitations of a human figure set up in the ploughed 
fields to frighten them. A woman in one of the 
cottages told me that once when going round among 
the furze bushes where her things were drying she 
noticed a dunnock slip out from under a sheet and fly 
away. She lifted the sheet and found a nest with 



THE COMING OF SPRING 271 

fledglings in it close to the top of the bush. " Why, 
gracious me ! " she exclaimed, " perhaps I've been 
covering their dear little nesties with my washing 
without ever knowing such a thing. I'll just have 
a look at the other bushes." And at the very next 
bush on peering under the cloth spread over it she 
spied a dunnock sitting on its nest — sitting, she soon 
found, on five lovely little blue eggs ! In the evening 
when the family were having tea she told them about 
it, and immediately her boys began to tease her to tell 
them where the nest was, and after a good deal of talk 
and solemn promise on the part of the boys that they 
would not take nor even touch one of the little blue 
eggs, and many warnings on her side that they would 
have the rope's end if they ever dared to do such 
a cruel thing, she led the way to the bush and allowed 
them all to have a good look at the nest and the five 
little gems of blue colour lying in it. But from that 
day she had no peace, for now her bad boys had got 
a means of coercing her, and she had to let them stay 
away from school and go where and do what they 
liked and to give them bread and butter and pasties 
at all hours of the day and whatever they asked for ; 
for if she refused them anything they would say, 
" Then we'll go and get the eggs out of the hedge- 
sparrow's nest " ; nor could she punish them for any- 
thing they did for the same reason. It was only 
when the blue eggs hatched and the young birds were 
safely reared that she got the upper hand in her house 
once more. Poor, anxious, thin, shrill-voiced woman, 
fighting for a small bird with her rough sons, her hus- 



272 THE LAND'S END 

band standing silent by listening with amused con- 
tempt to the dispute ; for he too had been a boy, and 
was not the harrying of birds a boy's proper pastime ? 
But she was one of the few who made it possible for 
me to live with and not hate my fellow-creatures 
even in these habitations of cruelty. 

In conclusion of this chapter I will relate two other 
little incidents of this kind which show that the 
spirit of mercy is not wholly dead. A pair of pied 
wagtails were constantly seen at a stone quarry near 
a village I stayed at, and as they appeared very 
tame I spoke to the quarrymen about them. They 
said the birds had lived there, winter and summer, 
five years, and bred every spring in a hole among the 
stones at the side of the quarry. They were as tame 
as chickens and came for crumbs every day at dinner 
time, and when it was raining and the men had to 
take shelter in their little stone hut inside the quarry, 
the wagtails, or tinners as they are called in West 
Cornwall, would run in and feed at their feet. 

On my return, in the spring of 1907, to this place 
I found a pair of wheatears in possession ; they had 
fought the wagtails and driven them away and made 
their nest in the same place. The same kindly pro- 
tection was given to them as to the old favourites, 
though they never became so tame ; and I saw the 
young safely brought off. 

We have seen in a former chapter that the robin is 
somewhat of a sacred bird, or at all events that the 
feeling in its favour, superstitious or not, is so general 
that even in the darkest part of the country the bird 



THE COMING OF SPRING 273 

when caught in a gin is released and allowed to fly 
away, to perish of its hurts or drag out a miserable 
existence in a maimed condition. This feeling is a 
great protection to the bird, but in many boys the 
bird-hunting and nest-destroying passion overmasters 
it, so that I am not greatly surprised when I find 
boys persecuting robin redbreast. 

One very warm morning in early spring, walking 
uphill from Penzance to Castle-an-Dinas, I came on 
two boys, aged about ten and eleven respectively, 
lying on the green turf by the side of the hedge. A 
nice place to rest and nice company ; so I threw my- 
self down by them and started talking, naturally 
about the birds. They replied reluctantly, exchanging 
glances and looking very uncomfortable. There were 
plenty of nests now, I said ; I was finding a good 
many, and I asked them directly how many they knew 
of with eggs and young birds in them. Seeing that I 
put it that way they recovered courage and one, after a 
brief whispered consultation with the other, said 
that there was a robin's nest close to my side, and on 
looking round I spied a fully-fledged young robin 
standing on a trodden-down little nest on the bank- 
side. 1 picked the bird up and was surprised at its 
docility, for it made no effort to escape, and then, 
more surprising still, the old bird flew down and 
perched a yard off, but did not appear at all anxious 
about the safety of its young. " I wonder," said I, 
" what has become of the others ? There must have 
been more young robins in this nest — it looks as if it 
had had three or four to tread it down." 



274 THE LAND'S END 

Whereupon one of the boys produced a second 
robin from his jacket pocket, and when I took it 
from him the other boy pulled out two more robins 
from his pockets and handed them to me. 

" Now look here," I began in my severest tone, and 
proceeded to give them a lecture on their unkindness 
in taking young robins, and did not forget to quote 
Blake on the subject, for of all birds the robin was the 
least fitted to be made a prisoner, and so on until 1 
finished. 

But the boys showed no sense of guilt or repent- 
ance and were no more disturbed at my words than 
the robins were at being handled, and at length one of 
them said that they had no intention of taking the 
birds home. 

" What, then, did you have them in your pockets 
for ? " I demanded. 

He replied that they put them in their pockets just 
to keep them out of my sight. They were playing 
with the birds when I found them, and they had 
known the nest since it was made, and every day after 
the young had come out one or both of them had 
paid them a visit, and they always brought a small 
supply of caterpillars to feed the robins with. 

It was quite true, the tameness of the four young 
robins sitting on our hands and knees was a proof of it. 
From time to time while we sat there with them the old 
birds flew down near us just to take a look round as 
it seemed and then flew off again, but by and by when 
we put them back on their little platform the parents 
came and fed them close to our side. 




CHAPTER XVIII 

SOME EARLY FLOWERS 

Late flowers at Land's End — Sweet-scented colt's-foot — Its luxuri- 
ance and beauty — A pretty and singular girl — A gardener on 
the colt's-foot— Colt's-foot in Madron churchyard — A vegetable 
rat — Billy and his charlock bouquet — " Farmer's Glory" — Early 
blue flowers — A matter-of-fact girl — Vernal squill — Beauty and 
habits — A blue band by the sea — The glory of flowers — Secret 
of the charm of flowers — Expression of the blue flower. 

BIRDS are perhaps too much to me ; at all 
events, I find that an entire chapter has been 
written on the coming of spring without a word 
in it about flowers ; it was nearly all taken up with 
the feathered people. Yet one cannot think of spring 
without those little touches of moist brilliant colour 
shining gem-like among the old dead brown leaves 
and herbage and in all green places. Even here, in 

275 



276 THE LAND'S END 

a district comparatively flowerless for many months, 
as I have said, there are flowers to be seen if looked 
for pretty well all the year round. Just now, before 
sitting down to write this chapter at the windy bleak 
Land's End, a very few days before Christmas, I 
went out in the late afternoon, and seeing herb-robert 
looking very pretty in the shelter of a stone hedge, 
then some other small flower, and then others, I began 
idly plucking a spray or two of each, and after cross- 
ing three or four fields and home again I found that 
my little bouquet contained blooms of seventeen dif- 
ferent species. If I had gone on a few fields further 
the number might have been twenty-five or thirty. 
These little summer and autumn flowers that bloom 
on till frosts come are all of very common kinds, 
except, perhaps, the yellow pansy which is confined 
to the western extremity of the county. There are 
other flowers proper to the early spring which were 
a delight to me and which will ever be associated in 
my mind with the thoughts of Cornwall. 

Curiously enough the one which comes first to my 
mind is a plant universally despised and disliked by 
the common people and, for all I know to the con- 
trary, by the people who are not common : they speak 
of it as a "weed" and a "nuisance"; nor is it a 
spring or summer flower but blooms in midwinter. 
It is already coming out now and before the middle 
of January will be in full bloom. This is the sweet- 
scented colt's-foot, sometimes called winter heliotrope, 
on account both of the purple colour and powerful 
scent of the flower. The books say that it smells of 



SOME EARLY FLOWERS 277 

vanilla, also that the plant is an alien, but when 
introduced they do not say. The Victorian History 
of Cornwall does not mention such a plant. I have 
looked at the MS. work of John Rolfe (1878) on the 
plants of West Cornwall, in the Penzance Library, 
but he does not tell us how long ago it ran wild in 
this district. It flourishes greatly at Penzance, 
St. Ives and many of the neighbouring villages, root- 
ing itself in the stone hedges and covering them 
entirely with a marvellously beautiful garment of 
round, disc-shaped, flat leaves, of all sizes from that 
of a crown piece to that of a dessert plate, all of the 
most vivid green in nature. The flowers, of a dim 
lilac-purple, are on thick straight stems which spring 
directly from the roots, and, like sweet violets, they 
are mostly hidden by the luxuriant leaves. The leaves, 
which come in winter and spring, last pretty well all 
the year round, and the roots, the gardeners say, are 
enormous, and as they push through the crevices and 
wind themselves about among the stones it is impos- 
sible to get rid of the plant. 

One of the prettiest scenes I witnessed in West 
Cornwall is associated with this plant. I saw a girl of 
about seventeen, small for her age and of a slim 
figure, come out of a cottage door and walk down to 
the little garden gate just as I came abreast of it. At 
the gate was a little foot-bridge over a stream which 
rushed by with a good deal of noise and foam over 
the rocks in its bed. The stone hedges and detached 
masses of rock on both sides of the bridge were 
covered over with an enormous growth of colt's-foot, 



278 THE LAND'S END 

the plants flowing over into the stream and even 
covering some of the big boulder stones in it. That 
was the setting and the girl was worthy of it, stand- 
ing there, fresh from the wash-tub, her arms bare to 
the shoulders, in her thin blue cotton gown, regarding 
me with lively inquisitive eyes. She had the double 
attraction of prettiness and singularity. It was a 
Cornish face, healthy but colourless as in the majority 
of the women, very broad, high cheek-bones ; but 
it differed in the fineness of the features and in 
the pointed chin which together with the large eyes 
gave it that peculiar interesting cat-like form seen in 
some pretty women, and which is so marked in a 
well-known portrait of Queen Mary at Holyrood. 
The large eyes were of the greyish-blue colour so 
common in this district, with large pupils and that 
deepening of colour at the outer edge of the iris 
which takes the appearance of a black ring. These 
ringed blue eyes are sometimes seen in other counties 
but are most common in the part of Cornwall where 
I have observed the people. Finally in strange con- 
trast with the large blue eyes her hair was black and 
being unbound the wind was blowing it all about her 
face and neck. 

I stopped to talk to the girl and had plenty of time 
to get my mental sketch of her. Speaking of the 
colt's-foot, so abundant at her own door, she told 
me that she had never heard it named anything but 
" weed." She also assured me that she hated it, and 
so did every one, and she could see nothing to admire 
in it. 



SOME EARLY FLOWERS 279 

At Penzance a gardener told me he had been fight- 
ing this weed all his life and that his father before him 
had fought with it all his life, so that it must have 
established itself in that place a very long time ago. 

At Madron, the famous and beautiful old village 
on the heights above Penzance, I saw a curious thing 
in January, 1907. A great part of the extensive 
churchyard is covered with colt's-foot, and after it had 
come into bloom the whole of the mass of vivid 
green leaves was killed by the great frost I have 
described in chapter xv., but strange to say the 
flowers were not hurt. The ground was covered 
with the upright thick stems, crowned with their pale 
purple fragrant flowers, and beneath them, dead and 
brown and flat on the earth, lay the leaves that lately 
hid them with their multitudinous green discs. 

One day, meeting some boys by the side of a hedge 
overgrown with colt's-foot, 1 asked them what they 
called the plant, and was answered by the biggest boy 
who knew most that it was called " rat-plant." It was 
named so, perhaps, because a rat could take shelter in 
the leaves and run very freely about among them 
without being seen. Or it may be that the name was 
bestowed to express a feeling of dislike and contempt 
— the idea that it was a vegetable rat, something to be 
warred against, dug up and if possible extirpated. It 
is a pleasure to me to think we can no more get rid 
of Petasites fragrans, alias " rat-plant," than we can of 
Mus decumanus itself, or Blatta orientalis> or any other 
of the undesirable aliens, plant or animal, which succeed 
in defying our best efforts to oust them. 



280 THE LAND'S END 

Perhaps some of my sober-minded readers, who 
know the colt's-foot and have not seen its beauty, 
may smile at my enthusiasm even as I have smiled at 
my Cornish landlady's story of Billy and his enthu- 
siasm for another species of wild flower. Billy is a 
youth of about twenty, son of a small farmer in one 
of the villages I stayed at. This, like most of the 
villages on this coast, receives its quota of summer 
visitors who come from distant inland towns, and 
some of these found accommodation at Billy's parents' 
farm. They were ladies, and Billy was greatly im- 
pressed with their beauty and affability, their dainty 
dresses, and the nice way in which they passed the 
time, strolling about, sketching, reading, lying on the 
turf, and sitting in picturesque attitudes on the rocks. 
But what perhaps interested him most was the keen 
pleasure they took in the common natural objects of 
the place, especially the wild flowers. They talked to 
Billy on the subject with the result that he, too, became 
an admirer of wild flowers, greatly to the amusement 
of his neighbours. 

One day my landlady, going along the village 
street, saw Billy driving home in the farm trap with 
what looked like a gigantic yellow buttonhole in his 
coat. " Why, Billy, whatever have you got there ? " 
she cried when he pulled the horse up to speak to her. 
" Flowers," said Billy. " I saw them in a cornfield, and 
I left the horse and went right out into the middle of 
the field to get them. Ain't they pretty ?" And taking 
the bunch, the stems of which he had thrust into his 
top pocket, he handed it down for her to admire. 



SOME EARLY FLOWERS 281 

" Goodness me, boy, it's nothing but charlock ! " she 
exclaimed. 

" Yes, 1 know," said Billy. " And they are very 
pretty ; just you look at them — perhaps you never 
knew how pretty they are." Then he added senten- 
tiously, " They are flowers, and all flowers are 
beautiful." 

" Dear, dear ! " said she for only reply, handing him 
back his bouquet. 

" When I get home," continued Billy, " I'll put 
them in water to keep them fresh and set them on 
the table," and away he drove. 

Billy with his charlock flowers reminds me of an 
incident on a farm in Hampshire where I was staying. 
The farmer was a hard-headed and very hard-working 
man absorbed in the great business of keeping his 
farm like a farm and of making it pay. Tares, turnip- 
fly, charlock, couch-grass and their like — these were 
his enemies which he hated. And his wife was his 
worthy helpmate. 

One day I brought in a big bunch of poppies, and 
after arranging them on their tall stems with some 
feathery grasses in a vase I put them on the table just 
laid for the midday meal. The farmer came in fresh 
from his work, his mind as usual absorbed in his 
affairs, and first taking up the carving-knife and fork 
hurriedly said, " For what we are about to receive," 
and was just going to plunge the fork into the joint 
when he caught sight of the splendid flowers before 
him on his own table, audaciously smiling their scarlet 
smile right at him. 



282 THE LAND'S END 

" What are those ? " he said, pointing with his knife 
at the flowers and addressing his wife in no pleasant 
tones. "What does this mean ?" 

She cast down her eyes and kept silence. 

" I can tell you," I said. " I gathered them myself 
in one of your fields and put them on the table much 
against your wife's wish. I can't imagine why she 
objected. It is one of our finest wild flowers — I call 
it the Farmer's Glory." 

" The Farmer's Glory ! — Oh, that's what you call 

it — well ," and then he suddenly sat down and 

began carving with tremendous energy and in grim 
silence. 

My pen has run away with me, since I had the 
images of but two or three wild flowers in my mind 
to write about in this chapter — flowers of the early 
spring only — and then the winter heliotrope came up 
and would not be denied. True, it was of the winter, 
like Kirke White's " Rosemary " — 

Sweet-scented flower ! who art wont to bloom 

On January's front severe, 
And o'er the wintry desert drear 

To waft thy sweet perfume — 

still, I had to write about it. A flower, like a bird or 
anything in nature, is little to me unless it " ministers 
some particular cause of remembrance," which means 
in my case that either on account of its intrinsic 
beauty or charm or of its associations it moves my 
emotions more strongly than others. 

The colt's-foot having come first, there are but two 
others to speak particularly of — a yellow and a blue 



SOME EARLY FLOWERS 283 

flower. But the yellow is the furze, so important a 
flower in this part of England and so much to me, 
that it must have a chapter to itself, so that in this 
chapter there will be but one described ; but I shall 
speak of others incidentally and of several things 
besides. 

In my early spring rambles I found that blue 
flowers were more abundant than all of other colours 
put together ; but this was in the rough places and 
lanes and by the stone and furze hedges. Here in 
places almost all the flowers appeared to be blue, 
from the tall blue columbine to the small ground ivy 
and the tiniest veronica. Of these I think the most 
remarkable was the wild hyacinth on account of its 
habit of growing on the tops of the old stone hedges. 
The effect is not so charming as when we see them 
covering the ground under the trees ; but it is most 
singular and beautiful too when the band of blue has 
the furze bushes covered with yellow blossoms for 
background. 

One April day I had a talk with a native about the 
blue flowers which were abundant and in great variety 
at the side of the path. This was on the slope of a 
hill looking to the sea, about a mile from Mousehole. 
I saw a girl crossing a grass field, and as she was 
making for a gate opening on to the path, I waited 
for her and when she came out we went on together 
for some distance. She had been to take her father 
his dinner in a field where he was working and was 
now on her way back to their cottage. Her age was 
about nineteen or twenty and she was of the most 



284 THE LAND'S END 

common type found in these parts — short, strongly 
built, somewhat dumpy ; a blonde with grey or bluish- 
grey eyes, light fluffy hair, and broad colourless face. 
There was not a good feature in it, yet it did not 
strike one as homely but was pleasant to look at on 
account of the lively, intelligent and good-natured 
expression. Finally, she was not flustered or put out 
in the least degree at being spoken to and joined in 
her walk by a stranger, but conversed freely with me 
in that simple natural frank way which seems to me 
the usual way in Cornwall. 

Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, in his book The Heart 
of the Country, has a good deal to say about the separa- 
tion of the classes in rural England — the great impass- 
able gulf which exists between gentleman and peasant. 
As an instance of this he relates that one evening, 
when walking from a station to the village he was 
staying at, he overtook a young woman going the 
same way, and keeping together they conversed quite 
naturally and pleasantly until they got to the end of 
the dark lane to where there was a lamp, when it was 
revealed to the young woman that her companion was 
not of her own class. " Why," she exclaimed, staring 
at him in astonishment, " you are a gentleman ! " 
And with that took to her heels and vanished in the 
dark. 

Such an incident would read like a fable in Corn- 
wall — in West Cornwall at all events — for it could 
not possibly happen there. The caste feeling so com- 
mon elsewhere hardly exists, and if a gentleman 
speaks to a young woman in a quiet lane she does 



SOME EARLY FLOWERS 285 

not suspect that he has any designs on her nor feel 
any sense of awe or strangeness to make her silent or 
awkward. She talks to him as naturally as to one of 
her own class. It is this common bond between 
people which one finds a relief and pleasure when 
going from an English, or an Anglo-Saxon, county to 
Cornwall and which made it pleasant to me to walk 
with this homely commonplace peasant girl. 

But when I talked to her about the flowers growing 
in profusion by the hedge-side and along the borders 
of the path she assured me that she never looked 
at them and knew nothing about them. Well, 
yes, she did know three or four wild flowers by 
their names. 

"But surely," I said, "you must know these that are 
so common — these little blue flowers, for instance, what 
do you call them ? " and I plucked a spray of speed- 
well. She said they were violets, and when I picked 
a violet and pointed out the difference in shape and 
size and colour she agreed that they were a little un- 
like when you looked at them, " but," she said, " we 
never look at them and we call all these little blue ones 
violets." "But," I persisted, "flowers are the most 
beautiful things on the earth and we all love and admire 
them and are glad to see them again in spring — surely 
you must know something more than you say about 
them — you must have been accustomed to gather them 
in your childhood." But she would not have it. "We 
never take notice of wild flowers," she said ; "they are 
no use and we call them all violets — all these blue 
ones." And she pointed to the hedge-side, where there 



286 THE LAND'S END 

were violet, forget-me-not, bird's-eye and ground-ivy 
all growing together. 

The poor girl did not know much — less than most, 
perhaps — even less than Billy of the charlock bouquet 
who had got the one parrot phrase that all flowers are 
beautiful in his brain ; but that which I sought in her 
and in the pretty, lively Cornish, kitten-like girl 
already described, and in dozens more, does not come 
from reading books, nor is it found only in the intelli- 
gent. That something lacking in them which you can 
find by seeking in the more stolid and seemingly duller 
Anglo-Saxon peasant is of the race. 

But enough of adventures in this vain quest of the 
elusive spirit of romance or poetry. It still remains 
to speak of the early spring flowers, and of the blue 
one, which was no common and universal flower like 
those I have just mentioned, but one I had never seen 
growing wild until I came to Cornwall. This was the 
vernal squill, a small blue lily-shaped flower of a deli- 
cate, very beautiful blue, hardly deeper than that of 
the hairbell, growing in clusters of three or four on 
a polished stalk an inch or two or three in height. 
The stem varies in length according to the depth of 
the grass or herbage or dwarf heath among which it 
grows, as the flower likes to keep itself on a level 
with the surface of the grass, or nestling in it, like 
a stone in its setting. In April I first found it, a 
flower or two here and there, in small depressions and 
on sunny slopes sheltered from the blast by the huge 
rocks of the headlands : it was one of the few first 
early flowers which produce that most fairy-like 



SOME EARLY FLOWERS 287 

beautifying effect on these castled promontories, blos- 
soming at the feet of and among the rugged masses of 
granite overgrown with coarse grey lichen. 

By and by I was delighted to find that these few 
scattered blooms were but the first comers of an in- 
numerable multitude, for day by day and week by 
week the number of them increased, first keeping to 
the sunniest and most sheltered places, then spreading 
until they were everywhere along the coast. But 
always within its own curiously narrow limit, bloom- 
ing close to the cliff, in some places right to the very 
brink, but usually some yards back from it, distributed 
over the ground to a breadth of a dozen or fifteen 
yards, thus forming a band. Where the soil is favour- 
able and the flowers abundant the band is very 
conspicuous, and in places where the land slopes to 
the cliff it broadens and occupies the ground to a 
breadth of fifty to a hundred yards or even more, 
then narrows again and pursues its way, following the 
numberless indentations of the coastline, climbing up 
and down the steep slopes and sides of gullies and 
fading and almost vanishing on the barren heath on 
the highest cliffs. 

Now when I first saw the vernal squill, when it had 
been nothing in my mind but a little blue flower with 
a pretty book name, it captivated me with its delicate 
loveliness — its little drop of cerulean colour in a 
stony desolate place — and with its delightful perfume, 
but it certainly did not affect me greatly as I have 
been affected time and again by other flowers, first 
seen in the greatest profusion and in their best aspect. 



288 THE LAND'S END 

The commonest of all flowers, the buttercup, is one 
of these, as I first beheld it covering whole meadows 
with its pure delicately brilliant yellow. I remember 
at the end of the African War coming up one day in 
April from Southampton in a train full of soldiers 
just back from the veldt, and when a meadow bright 
with buttercups came in sight the men in my com- 
partment all jumped up and shouted with joy. That 
sight made them realise as no other could have 
done, that they were at home once more in England. 
The wild hyacinth is another flower which took a 
distinguished place in my mind from the first moment 
of its coming before my sight, a sea of misty blue 
beneath the woodland trees in their tender early 
spring foliage. Another is the gorse from the day 
I looked on a wide common aflame with its bloom, 
still another the briar rose first beheld in the 
greatest luxuriance and abundance on a vast unkept 
hedge in Southern England. Then, too, the fritillary 
on the occasion of my first finding it growing wild in 
a water-meadow and standing, as in a field of corn, 
knee-deep amidst the tens and hundreds of thousands 
of crowded slender stems with their nodding pendu- 
lous tulips so strangely chequered with darkest purple 
and luminous pink. But over all the revelations of 
the glory of flowers 1 have experienced in this land 
I hold my first sight of heather in bloom on the 
Scottish moors in August shortly after coming to this 
country. I remember how I went out and walked 
many miles over the moors, lured ever on by the 
sight of that novel loveliness until I was lost in 



SOME EARLY FLOWERS 289 

a place where no house was visible, and how at 
intervals when the sun broke through the clouds 
and shone on some distant hill or slope from which 
the grey mist had just lifted, revealing the purple 
colour beneath, it appeared like a vision of the 
Delectable Mountains. 

From the flowers which are greatest only because 
of their numbers, seeing that, comparing flower with 
flower, they are equalled and surpassed in lustre by 
very many other species, it may appear a far descent 
to my little inconspicuous lily by the sea. For what 
was there beyond the mere fact of its rarity to make 
it seem more than many others — than herb-robert 
in the hedge, for instance, or any small delicate red 
geranium or brighter lychnis ; or, to come to its own 
colour, veronica with its " darling blue," and, lovelier 
still, water forget-me-not, with a yellow pupil to its 
turquoise iris ; or the minute bird-shaped blue milk- 
wort, and gentian and bluebell and hairbell and borage 
and periwinkle and blue geranium, and that delicate 
rarity the blue pimpernel, and the still rarer and more 
beautiful blue anemone ? Nevertheless, after many 
days with this unimportant little flower, one among 
many, from its earliest appearance, when it blossomed 
sparingly at the foot of the rock, to the time when it 
had increased and spread to right and left and formed 
that blue-sprinkled band or path by which I walked 
daily by the sea, often sitting or lying on the turf the 
better to inhale its delicious perfume, it came to be 
more to me than all those unimportant ones which I 
have named, with many others equally beautiful, and 



290 THE LAND'S END 

was at last regarded as among the best in the land. 
For it had entered into my soul, and was among 
flowers an equal of the briar rose and honeysuckle 
in the English hedges and of the pale and vari- 
coloured Cornish heath as I saw it in August in 
lonely places among the Goonhilly Downs in the 
Lizard district, and, like that heath, it had become 
for ever associated in my mind with the thought 
of Cornwall. 

Its charm was due both to its sky-colour and 
perfume and its curious habit of growing just so far 
and no further from the edge of the cliff, so that 
when I walked by the sea I had that blue-flecked path 
constantly before me. One day I made the remark 
mentally that it appeared as if the sky itself, the genius 
or blue lady of the sky, had come down to walk by the 
sea and had left that sky-colour on the turf where she 
had trailed her robe, and this shade or quality of the 
hue set me thinking of a chapter I once wrote on the 
" Secret of the Charm of Flowers " {Birds and Man, 
pp. 140-62), in which the peculiar pleasure which cer- 
tain flowers produce in us was traced to their human 
colouring — in other words, the expression was due to 
human associations. Some of my friends would not 
accept this view, and although I still believe it the 
right one I became convinced in the course of the 
argument of a grave omission in my account of the 
blue flower — that it was unconsciously associated 
with the blue eye in man and received its distinctive 
expression from this cause alone. One of my corre- 
spondents, anxious to prove me wrong, quoted an 



SOME EARLY FLOWERS 291 

idea expressed by some one that flowers are beautiful 
and precious to us because, apart from their intrinsic 
charm of colour, fragrance and form, they are abso- 
lutely unrelated to our human life with its passions, 
sorrows and tragedies ; and, finally, he said of the 
blue flower, that if it had any associations at all they 
were not human ; the suggestion was of the blue sky, 
the open air, of fair weather. It was so in his own 
case — " I can feel the different blues of skies and air 
and distances in flower blue." 

Undoubtedly he was right as to the fair-weather 
suggestion in the blue flower — I could not look at 
the vernal squill without feeling convinced of it. 
Then, oddly enough, another correspondent who was 
also among my opponents kindly sent me this striking 
passage from an old writer, Sir John Feme, on azure 
in blazonry : " Which blew colour representeth the 
Aire amongst the elements, that of all the rest is the 
greatest favourer of life, as the only nurse and main- 
tainer of spirits in any living creature. The colour 
blew is commonly taken from the clear skye which 
appeareth so often as the tempests be overblowne, 
and note prosperous successe and good fortune to the 
wearer in all his affayres." 

My view now is that the human association is a 
chief factor in the expression of blue flowers in some 
species, such as pansy, violet, speedwell and various 
others, which bloom sparsely and are seen distinctly 
as single flowers and not as mere splashes of colour ; 
and that with blue flowers seen in masses, as in the 
case of the wild hyacinth and sometimes the viper's 



292 THE LAND'S END 

bugloss, the association is more with the clear blue 
sky. But doubtless both elements are present in 
all cases, that is to say with our race ; among 
dark-eyed people the expression of the blue flower 
would have the fair-weather association alone. 




CHAPTER XIX 

THE FURZE IN ITS GLORY 

Fascination of the furze — The furze in literature — Evelyn on the 
furze — Furze faggots — The beauty the effect of contrast — Large 
masses of bloom — Various aspects of the furze — Fragrance — 
Linnseus and the furze — The cynic a spiritual harpy — Furze at 
the Land's End — The stone hedges ropes of bloom — Eye-dazz- 
ling colour — Furze by the sea — Yellow and blue. 

I THINK that of all plants indigenous in this 
island the furze delights me the most. This says 
a good deal for a man who takes as much pleasure 
as any one in green and growing things ; in all of 
them, from the elm of greatest girth at Windsor or 
Badminton, or the noblest pine at Eversley, or the 
most aged oak at Aldermaston, down to the little ivy- 
leafed toad-flax growing on the wall. They move me, 
each in its way, according to its character, to admira- 
tion, love and reverence. No sooner do I begin to 
speak or even to think of them than they, or their 
images, are seen springing up as by a miracle round 
me, until I seem to be in a vast open forest where all 
beautiful things flourish exceedingly and each in turn 

293 



294 THE LAND'S END 

claims my attention. Merely to name them, with just 
a word or two added to characterise the special feeling 
produced in each case, would fill a page or more ; 
and the end of it all would be that the words used at 
the beo-inninir would have to be said again — I think 
the furze is the one which pleases me best. 

Now here is something which has been a puzzle to 
me and a cause of regret, or a sense of something 
missed — the fact that, excepting a word or two or a 
line about it in the poets, the furze is hardly to be 
found in literature. Think of the oak in this connec- 
tion ; think of the elm, the yew, the ash, the rowan, 
the holly, hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble, briar, bul- 
rush and flowering rush and heather, with many, many 
more trees, bushes and herbs, down even to the little 
pimpernel, the daisy, the forget-me-not and the lesser 
celandine. But who, beyond the line or two, has 
ever in verse or prose said anything in praise of the 
furze ? 

One day, in conversation with Sir William Thisel- 
ton-Dyer, the late Director of Kew Gardens, who 
knows a great deal more of books about plants than I 
do, I mentioned this fact to him, and, after taking 
thought, he said, " It is true, there isn't much to 
find, but let me recommend you to read Evelyn." 

It happened that I knew Evelyn and admired him 
for his noble diction : one really wonders how a man 
who looked at plants with his hard, utilitarian eyes, 
considering them solely for their uses, could write as 
he did. It is true that he saw some beauty in the 
holly, his favourite, but in little else. He mentions 



THE FURZE IN ITS GLORY 295 

the furze as a " vegetable trifle," and even goes so far 
as to give it a few favourable words, but without any- 
thing about its appearance, for that did not touch him. 
It is not a wholly useless plant, says Evelyn ; it is 
good for faggots, also it affords covert for wild fowl, 
and the tops (bruised) may be recommended for a sickly 
horse. "It will thoroughly recover and plump him." 

I have often watched the semi-wild ponies of the 
New Forest browsing quite freely on the blossomed 
tops, which they bruised for themselves with their 
own molars ; and now I know that the furze is also 
" good for faggots." I have described how, while 
staying at a small moorland farm during the winter, 
we had furze for fuel, and how the dried bushes 
made a glorious heat and illumination in the open 
wide fireplace of the old dark kitchen and living- 
room. A couple of months later when the plant 
was in full blossom — acres and miles and leagues of 
it — I could do no less than sing my poor little prose 
song of praise and gratitude. To me it is never 
" unprofitably gay," nor, when I handle it, does it 
wound my hardened fingers, causing me to recoil and 
cry out with the sensitive poet of the Task that it 
repels us with its treacherous spines as much as it 
attracts with its yellow bloom. 

The beauty of the furze in flower — that special 
beauty and charm in which it excels all other plants — 
is an effect of contrast, and is a beauty only seen in 
the entire plant, over which the bloom is distributed. 
We see that in shape and size, and almost in colour, 
the blossom nearly resembles that of the broom, but 



296 THE LAND'S END 

the effect is far more beautiful on account of the 
character of the plant — the exceeding roughness of 
its spiny surface, the rude shapes it takes and its 
darkness, over which the winged flame - coloured 
blossoms are profusely sprinkled. And when we see 
many contiguous bushes they do not lose their various 
individual forms, nor do the blossoms, however abun- 
dant, unite, as is the case with the broom, into very 
large masses of brilliant colour. 

I like to come upon a furze-patch growing on a 
slope, to sit below it and look up over its surface, 
thrown into more or less rounded forms, broken and 
roughened into sprays at the top, as of a sea churned 
by winds and cross-currents to lumpy waves, all 
splashed and crowned as it were with flame-coloured 
froth. With a clear blue sky beyond I do not know 
in all nature a spectacle to excel it in beauty. It is 
beautiful, perhaps above all things, just because the 
blossoming furze is not the " sheet of gold " it is often 
described, but gold of a flame-like brilliance sprinkled 
on a ground of darkest, harshest green. Sheets of 
brilliant colour are not always beautiful. I have 
looked on leagues of forest of Erythrina crista-galli 
covering a wet level marsh when the leafless trees were 
clothed in their blood-red blossoms and have not ad- 
mired the spectacle. Again, 1 have ridden through 
immense fields of viper's bugloss, growing as high as 
the horse's breast and so dense that he could hardly 
force his way through it, and the sheet of vivid blue 
in a dazzling sunlight affected me very disagreeably. 
It is the same with cultivated fields of daffodils, tulips 



THE FURZE IN ITS GLORY 297 

and other flowers, grown to supply the market ; the 
sight pleases best at a distance of a mile or half a 
mile ; and so in the case of a sheet of wild hyacinths, 
it delights the eye because it is seen under trees with 
a cloud of green foliage above to soften and bring the 
vivid hue into harmony with the general colouring. 

Now in the furze, or the dark green prickly sprays, 
the colour and roughness of which are never wholly 
covered and extinguished by the blossoms, there is an 
appearance which has probably never been described 
and perhaps not observed. The plant, we see, 
changes its colour somewhat with the seasons. It is 
darkest in winter, when, seen at a distance on the pale 
green or grey-green chalk downs, it looks almost 
black. Again, in summer when the rusty appearance 
which follows the flowering time is put off, the new 
terminal sprays have a blue-green or glaucous hue 
like the pine and juniper. But the most interesting 
change, which contributes to the beauty of the furze 
at its best, is in the spring, when the spines are tipped 
with straw-yellow and minute lines of the same colour 
appear along the spines and finer stems, and the effect 
of these innumerable specks and lines which catch the 
light is to give a bronzed appearance to the dark mass. 
It is curious that that change of colour does not always 
take place ; in many places you find the plants keep 
the uniform deep green of winter through the blos- 
soming season ; but the bronzed aspect is the loveliest, 
and makes the most perfect setting for the bloom. 

There are few things in nature that more delight 
the eye than a wild common or other incult place 



298 THE LAND'S END 

overgrown with bramble mixed with furze in flower 
and bracken in its vivid green, and scattered groups 
or thickets of hawthorn and blackthorn, with tangles 
and trails of ivy, briony, traveller's joy and honey- 
suckle. Yet the loveliness of our plant in such sur- 
roundings is to my mind exceeded by the furze when 
it possesses the entire ground and you have its splen- 
dour in fullest measure. Then, too, you can best 
enjoy its fragrance. This has a peculiar richness, and 
has been compared with pineapple and cocoanut ; I 
should say cocoanut and honey, and we might even 
liken it to apple-tart with clove for scent and flavour. 
Anyway, there is something fruity and appetising in 
the smell ; but this is not all, since along with that 
which appeals to the lower sense there is a more subtle 
quality, ethereal and soul-penetrating, like the per- 
fume of the mignonette, the scented orchis, violet, 
bog asphodel, narcissus and vernal squill. It may be 
said that flower-scents are of two sorts : those which, 
like fruits, suggest flavours, and those which are 
wholly unassociated with taste, and are of all odours 
the most emotional because of their power of recall- 
ing past scenes and events. In the perfume of the 
furze both qualities, the sensuous and the spiritual, 
are combined : doubtless it was the higher quality 
which Swinburne had in his mind when he sang — 

The whin was frankincense and flame. 

But we regard vision as the higher or more intel- 
lectual sense, and seeing is best ; and it was the sight 
of blossoming furze which caused Linnseus, on his 



THE FURZE IN ITS GLORY 299 

first visit to England, when he was taken to see it at 
Putney Heath, to fall on his knees and thank God 
for creating so beautiful a plant. 

I bring in this old story so that the cynical reader 
may not be cheated of his smile. He it is who 
said, and 1 believe he has had even the courage to 
print it, that there was nothing spontaneous in 
the act of the great Swedish naturalist, that he had 
rehearsed it beforehand, and doubtless dropped upon 
his knees several times in front of a pier-glass in his 
bedroom that very morning to make himself perfect 
in the action before being driven to Putney. 

Linnaeus is good enough for me, and for the 
majority of us I imagine, but what shall we say of the 
mockers, the spiritual harpies who come unbidden to 
our sacred feasts to touch and handle everything, and 
to defile and make hateful whatsoever they touch ? 
Alas, we cannot escape and cannot silence them, and 
may only say that we compassionate them ; since, 
however great they may be in the world, and though 
intellectually they may be but little lower than the 
gods, yet do they miss all that is sweetest and most 
precious in life. And further, we can only hope that 
when they have finished their little mocking day, that 
which they now are may be refashioned by wonderful 
Nature into some better thing — a dark, prickly bush, 
let us say, with blossoms that are frankincense and 
flame. 

Let this same fragrance sweeten our imaginations ; 
or, better still, let us forget that such beings exist in 
the world — intellectuals with atrophied hearts — and 



300 THE LANDS END 

see what the furze looks like in this Land's End 
district where it most abounds and the earth is clothed 
with it. In some places where the moorland has been 
reclaimed and parcelled out into grass fields the furze 
flourishes on the stone hedges : the effect is here 
singular as well as magnificent, when, standing on a 
high stone wall, you survey the surrounding country 
with innumerable furze-clothed hedges dividing the 
green fields around you in every direction, and appear- 
ing like stupendous ropes of shining golden bloom. 
Hedge beyond hedge they stretch away for miles to 
grey distant hills and the pale blue sky beyond. On 
some hedges the plant grows evenly, as if it had been 
cultivated and trimmed, forming a smooth rope of 
bloom and black prickles. In other and indeed most 
instances, the rounded big luxuriant bushes occur at 
intervals, like huge bosses, on the rope. 

Walking by one of these hedges in a very strong 
sunlight about mid-May when the bloom is in its 
greatest perfection, the sight is actually dazzling and 
hurts by the intense luminous colour. It is an unusual 
experience, but after a mile or so one almost 
unconsciously averts or veils the eye in passing one 
of these splendid bushes on which the blossoms are 
too closely crowded. 

Perhaps the best aspect of the plant is that of the 
rough unreclaimed places where the high land slopes 
down to the cliff and the furze grows luxuriantly 
along the edges and slopes of the deep clefts or little 
ravine-like valleys, the beds of crystal noisy little 
water-courses, peopled with troutlets no bigger than 



THE FURZE IN ITS GLORY 301 

minnows. Here the rude, untamable plant has its 
wildest and most striking appearance, now in the form 
of a huge mound where several bushes are closely 
interwoven, and now growing separately like ancient 
dwarf trees, mixed with brown heath and grey masses 
of granite. Here, too, you may come upon a clump 
of dwarf blackthorn bushes thickly covered with their 
luminous crystalline white little roses, never looking 
so wonderful in their immaculate whiteness as when 
thus seen contrasted with the rough black and flame- 
colour of the furze. 

Better still, you can here see the yellow and orange 
flame of the furze against the blue of the sea — a mar- 
vellously beautiful effect. I was reminded of a similar 
effect observed in a furzy place among the South 
Wiltshire downs a year before. It was one of those 
days when there are big dark masses of cloud in 
a clear sky and when the cloud shadows falling on 
distant woods and hills give them a deep indigo blue. 
The furze was in full bloom and had a new and 
strange glory in my eyes when seen against this deep 
blue of the distant landscape. 

Yellow and blue — yellow and blue ! A lady on 
the other side of the globe wrote complaining that 
these two colours in association had got on her nerves 
on account of something 1 had said in some book. 
That was the fault of the writing. In nature they 
never get on our nerves : they surprise us, because 
the sight is not an everyday one, and in some cases 
where they occupy a large field they intoxicate the 
mind with their unparalleled loveliness. It has ever 



3 o2 THE LAND'S END 

been a delight to me just before harvest time to walk 
in fine weather near the sea just to look at the red 
gold of the ripe corn against the blue water. We 
get a similar effect from these two complementary 
colours at sunset when the clouds are flushed yellow 
and orange in a blue sky. Also in the beech woods 
in October the sight of the great trees in their magni- 
ficent red-gold foliage would not impress us so deeply 
but for the blue sky seen through and above the 
wood. 




CHAPTER XX 
PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END 

How this book came to be written — Fascination of the Land's End 
— Aged pilgrims — A vision of the land of rest — An Unsentimental 
Journey through Cornwall — A horde of trippers from Lancashire 
— A sentiment to be cherished — An appeal. 

1 RECALL now that I did not come to Cornwall 
to write a book about it, or any part of it. But 
like many others I had to see the Land's End ; 
and it was winter, when the Wiltshire Downs, where 
it was my desire to be, are bleak, and I had a cold to 
get rid of, so I came to the "rocky land of strangers," 
to look once in my life on the famous headland and 
return with the wheatear and stone curlew to the 
lonely green hills. Being here I put down some 
impressions of gulls and fishing-boats at St. Ives for 
a weekly journal ; other impressions followed, and 

3°3 



3o 4 THE LAND'S END 

because the place held me month after month, and the 
old habit of taking notes, or stick-gathering, even when 
the sticks are of no more use than the vast store of 
stolen objects which my friend's pet white rat, who 
has the run of a big house, is accustomed to accumu- 
late, the material grew on my hands, until in the end 
I determined to put the best of it in a volume. In that 
way the book and every chapter grew. One chapter, 
headed " Bolerium ", contained my impressions of 
the famous headland itself, aiid having written it 1 
imagined there would be no more for me to say on 
that subject. Nevertheless, I continued to haunt the 
spot ; familiarity had not lessened its fascination, and 
there, by chance, one day in spring, I witnessed a 
scene which suggested, or perhaps I should say com- 
pelled me to write, this additional chapter as a con- 
clusion to the book. 

There were days at the headland when 1 observed 
a goodish number of elderly men among the pilgrims, 
some very old, and this at first surprised me, but 
by and by it began to seem only natural. I was par- 
ticularly impressed one day at noon in early spring in 
clear but cold weather with a biting north-east wind, 
when I found six or seven aged men sitting about on 
the rocks that lie scattered over the green slope be- 
hind the famous promontory. They were too old or 
too feeble to venture down on the rough headland : 
their companions had strayed away, some to the 
fishing cove, others along the higher cliffs, and left 
them there to rest. They were in great-coats with 
scarves and comforters round their necks, and hats or 




OLD FARM, LAND'S EN' I) 



To face paj;e 304 



PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END 305 

caps drawn well down ; and they sat mostly in de- 
jected attitudes, bending forward, their hands resting 
on the handles of their sticks, some with their chins 
on their hands, but all gazed in one direction over 
the cold grey sea. Strangers to each other, unlike 
in life and character, coming from widely separated 
places, some probably from countries beyond the 
ocean, yet all here, silently gazing in one direction 
beyond that rocky foreland, with the same look of 
infinite weariness on their grey faces and in their dim 
sad eyes, as if one thought and feeling and motive had 
drawn them to this spot. Can it be that the senti- 
ment or fancy which is sown in our minds in child- 
hood and lies asleep and forgotten in us through most 
of our years, revives and acquires towards the end 
a new and strange significance when we have entered 
upon our second childhood ? The period, I mean, 
when we recover our ancient mental possessions — the 
heirlooms which cannot be alienated or lost, which 
have descended to us from our remotest progenitors 
through centuries and thousands of years. These 
old men cannot see the objects which appear to 
younger eyes— the distant passing ships, and the land 
— that dim, broken line as of a low cloud on the 
horizon, of the islands : their sight is altered from 
what it was, yet is, perhaps, now able to discern 
things invisible to us — other islands, uncharted, not 
the Cassiterides. What are they, these other islands, 
and what do we know of them ? Nothing at all ; 
indeed, nothing can be known to the generality ; 
only these life-weary ancients, sitting on rocks and 



3 o6 THE LAND'S END 

gazing at vacancy, might enlighten us if they would. 
Undoubtedly there are differences of sight among 
them which would make their descriptions vary, but 
they would probably all agree in affirming that the 
scene before them has no resemblance to the earlier 
vision. This grey-faced very old man with his chin 
on his hands, who looks as if he had not smiled these 
many years, would perhaps smile now if he were to 
recall that former vision, which came by teaching 
and served well enough during his hot youth and 
strenuous middle age. He does not see before him 
a beautiful blessed land bright with fadeless flowers, 
nor a great multitude of people in shining garments 
and garlands who will come down to the shore to 
welcome him with sounds of shouting and singing 
and playing on instruments of divers forms, and who 
will lead him in triumph to the gardens of everlasting 
delight and to mansions of crystal with emerald and 
amethyst colonnades and opal domes and turrets 
and pinnacles. Those glories and populous realms of 
joy have quite vanished : he sees now only what his 
heart desires — a silent land of rest. No person will 
greet him there ; he will land and go up alone into 
that empty and solitary place, a still grey wilderness 
extending inland and upward hundreds of leagues, 
an immeasurable distance, into infinity, and rising to 
mountain ridges compared with which the Himalayas 
are but mole-hills. The sky in that still land is always 
pale grey-blue in colour, and the earth, too, is grey 
like the rocks, and the trees have a grey-green foliage 
— trees more ancient in appearance than the worn 



PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END 307 

granite hills, with gnarled and buttressed trunks like 
vast towers and immense horizontal branches, casting 
a slight shade over many acres of ground. Onwards 
and upwards, with eyes downcast, he will slowly take 
his devious way to the interior, feeling the earth with 
his staff, in search of a suitable last resting-place. 
And when he has travelled many, many leagues and 
has found it — a spot not too sunny nor too deeply 
shaded, where the old fallen dead leaves and dry moss 
have formed a thick soft couch to recline on and a 
grey exposed root winding over the earth offers a rest 
to his back — there at length he will settle himself. 
There he will remain motionless and contented 
for ever in that remote desert land where is no 
sound of singing bird nor of running water nor of 
rain or wind in the grey ancient trees : waking and 
sleeping he will rest there, dreaming little and think- 
ing less, while year by year and age by age the 
memory of the world of passion and striving of 
which he was so unutterably tired grows fainter 
and fainter in his mind. And he will have neither 
joy nor sorrow, nor love nor hate, nor wish to 
know them any more ; and when he remembers his 
fellow-men it will comfort him to think that his 
peace will never be broken by the sight of human 
face or the sound of human speech, since never by 
any chance will any wanderer from the world discover 
him in that illimitable wilderness. 

This may not have been the precise vision of that 
old man, sitting on a rock with chin resting on his 
hands ; it is merely my interpretation of his appear- 



308 THE LAND'S END 

ance and expression at that spot — his grey weary 
face, his dejected attitude, his immobility ; his and 
that of the five or six others — those grey old men 
who, by a strange chance, had all come to the place 
one day at the same hour, and had been left to their 
own melancholy thoughts by their younger, more 
active companions. It was mere chance, but the 
sight profoundly impressed me and gave me a more 
vivid idea than I had hitherto had of the fascination 
this last rocky headland has for our minds. 

Then, when the strange spectacle of those aged 
men on that bleak day, seated, each on his rock, 
twenty or thirty yards apart, absorbed in his own 
mournful thoughts and gazing out fixedly on the 
troubled sea, was still fresh, other incidents came to 
keep the subject uppermost in my mind and to com- 
pel me to return to it and to make in conclusion 
a practical suggestion. 

One of the " incidents " mentioned was the perusal 
of a book on Cornwall which I picked up in Penzance 
for the sake of the excellent illustrations rather than 
to read it. I had already read or glanced through 
forty or fifty or, it may be, a hundred books on Corn- 
wall with little pleasure or profit and did not want to 
read any more. It was An Unsentimental Journey 
through Cornwall^ by the author of John Halifax^ 
Gentleman^ a lady who could not be unsentimental if 
she tried ever so hard. 

The book is dated 1884, but a few years before 
the author's death, when she was a feeble old lady 
whose long life-work of producing novels was over, 



PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END 309 

and her time in Cornwall was limited to seventeen 
September days. We are concerned only with her 
visit to the Land's End, and I quote here a portion of 
her account of it : — 

" It would be hard if, after journeying thus far and 




NEAR SENNEN COVE 



looking forward to it so many years, the day on which 
we went to the Land's End should turn out a wet 
day ! . . . We wondered for the last time, as we 
had wondered for half a century, what the Land's End 
would be like. . . . 



3io THE LAND'S END 

" At first our thought had been What in the world 
shall we do here for two mortal hours ? Now we 
wished we had two whole days. A sunset, a sunrise, 
a starlit night, what would they have been in this 
grand lonely place — almost as lonely as a ship at 
sea ! . . . 

" The bright day was darkening, and a soft grey- 
ness began to creep over land and sea. No, not soft, 
that is the very last adjective applicable to the Land's 
End. Even on that calm day there was a fresh wind 
— there must be always a wind — and the air felt 
sharper and more salt than any sea-air I ever knew, 
stimulating too, so that our nerves were strung to the 
highest pitch of excitement. We felt able to do any- 
thing without fear and without fatigue. . . . Still, 
though a narrow and giddy path, there was a path, 
and the exploit, though a little risky, was not fool- 
hardy. We should have been bitterly sorry not to 
have done it — not to have stood for one grand ten 
minutes where in all our lives we may never stand 
again, at the furthest point where footing is possible, 
gazing out on that magnificent circle of sea which 
sweeps over the submerged land of Lyonesse, far, far 
away into the wide Atlantic. . . . 

" Half a mile from Marazion the rain ceased, and 
a light like that of a rising moon began to break 
through the clouds. What a night it might be, or 
might have been, could we have stayed at the Land's 
End! 

" That ghastly * might have been ' ! It is in great 
things as in small, the worry, the torment, the para- 



PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END 311 

lyzing burden of life. Away with it ! We have 
done our best to be happy and we have been happy. 
We have seen the Land's End." 

Her cheerfulness makes one's eyes moisten — that 
one day at the Land's End, when her life's work was 
over, when in spite of her years and weak nerves she 
ventured painfully down and out among those rough 
crags, assisted by her guide and companion, for one 
grand ten minutes on the outermost rock — the fulfil- 
ment of a dream of fifty years ! 

She was a very gentle, tender-hearted woman, as 
sweet and lovable a soul as ever dwelt on earth, but 
her mind was only an average one, essentially medi- 
ocre ; in her numerous works she never rose above 
the commonplace. There are thousands of women 
all over the country who could produce as many and 
as good books as hers if they were industrious enough 
and thought it worth their while to take up novel- 
writing as a profession. She wrote for the million 
and is understood by them, and I take it that in her 
dream and sentiment about the Land's End she 
represents her public — the mass of the educated 
women in England — just as she represents their 
feeling about love and the domestic virtues and life 
generally in her John Halifax, Mistress and Maid, A 
Life for a Life and scores of other works. 

But books, however eloquent and heart-searching 
they may be, cannot produce an effect comparable to 
that of seeing and hearing — to the sight and sound 
of emotion in men's faces and voices and in their 
words. The passage I have quoted, and all the other 



312 THE LAND'S END 

passages on the subject in the other books I had read, 
gave me no such vivid idea of the strength of the 
sentiment we are considering as did the other incident 
I wish to relate when, on May 24, at Penzance 
station, I witnessed the arrival, in four trains, of 
about twelve hundred trippers from some of the 
cotton-spinning centres forty or fifty miles north of 
Manchester. The first train steamed into the station, 
where a crowd had gathered to see the horde of 
strange people from the north, at 10.45 '■> tne ^ ast °^ 
the four arrived a little before 12 at noon. The 
return journey would begin at 6.30 on the same day: 
the entire distance to and from Penzance was con- 
siderably over eight hundred miles ; the time it took, 
twenty-six to twenty-eight hours, and the time the 
travellers had at their disposal at their destination was 
about seven hours. I was amazed that twelve 
hundred men had been found to undertake such a 
journey just to see Penzance — one of the least in- 
teresting towns in the kingdom ; but when I mixed 
with and talked with them on their arrival, they as- 
sured me they had not come for such an object and 
would be content to go back without seeing Penzance. 
Nor did they come for the sake of anything in fine 
scenery which Cornwall could show them ; North 
Wales with its bold sea-coast and magnificent moun- 
tain scenery was easily accessible to them. What they 
came to see was the Land's End. 

The Cornishmen who were present could not 
understand this. I talked with one poor fellow, who 
sat down on a bench looking very pale, saying that 



PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END 313 

after thirteen hours in the train without a wink of 
sleep he felt very tired ; but he was greatly dis- 
appointed at not having got a seat in the first lot of 
conveyances which were driving off loaded with his 
fellow travellers to the Land's End, and feared that he 
might miss seeing it after all. Among those who 
had gathered round to hear what was said were two 
old Penzance men and they laughed heartily. " Why," 
said one, " I've been here within ten miles of the 
Land's End all my life and have never seen it." 
" I can say as much, and more," said the other ; 
" I've never seen it and never want to see it." 
" Perhaps," I remarked, " if you had been born five 
hundred or five thousand miles away you would have 
felt differently about it." The poor pale Lancastrian 
looked pleased. " That's true ! " he exclaimed. " I've 
always wanted to see the Land's End, and it's the 
same with all of us : we've come to see it and for 
nothing else." 

It was the literal truth, as I found by hanging about 
and talking with these men from the north all that 
day, watching them going and returning. But the 
motor buses, char-a-bancs and other vehicles were not 
enough to take them all, and when it came to three 
o'clock and half-past three, and there was but time 
left to go with all speed, look for a few brief minutes 
at the rocks, and hasten back in time for the last train, 
the poor fellows began offering five shillings per man 
to be driven there and back, and then at the last some 
offered ten shillings. But it was too late and they 
could not be taken ! 



314 THE LAND'S END 

Is this sentiment, which is not confined to our island 
country but survives in the transplanted race in other 
regions of the globe, this feeling which the matter- 
of-fact Cornishman laughs at and which may make 
many of us smile when we meet with it in a printed 
book, but is in us all the same and a part of our life 
— is this sentiment of any value and worth cherishing ? 
I take it that it is, since if we were stripped of senti- 
ment, illusions and such traditions, romance and 
dreams, as we inherit or which gather about and 
remain with us to the end of our days, we should be 
beggared indeed. Well, let it be so, it may be said 
in reply ; 'tis in you and in many of us, and some 
have it not, and that's all there is to be said about it — 
why then speak of cherishing ? For the following 
reason in this particular case : the sentiment relates to 
a locality, a spot of land with peculiar features and 
character, a rocky headland with the boundless ocean 
in front and the desolate wind-swept moor behind. 
These features, an image of which is carried in our 
minds from childhood, are bound up with and are 
part and parcel of the feeling, so that to make any 
change in such a spot, to blow up the headland, for 
instance, as any one could do with a few shillings' worth 
of dynamite, or to alter and deface the surface of the 
adjacent land and build big houses and other ugly 
structures on it, would be felt by every pilgrim as an 
indignity, a hateful vandalism. We have seen in the 
case of Hindhead and of many other places which 
powerfully attract us, what the greed and philistinism 
of man will do to destroy an ancient charm. A man 



PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END 315 

may do what he likes with his own — a frightful liberty 
when we remember how God's footstool has been 
parcelled out among private persons, and what brutish 
men, or men without the sense of beauty, have done 
and may do to spoil it. I suppose that if Sir Edmund 
Antrobus thought proper he could run up a red-brick 
hotel or sanatorium high as Hankey's Mansions at 
Stonehenge : but not Stonehenge, nor Mona, nor 
Senlac, nor that hoary fane where Britain buries her 
great dead, nor any castle or cathedral, or tower or 
river or mountain or plain in all the land draws us so 
powerfully as this naked moor and rude foreland with 
its ancient dim memories and associations. And we 
now see what is being done with it — how plots of land 
for building purposes are being sold right and left, 
and the place in every way vulgarised and degraded. 

Undoubtedly there are men so devoid of senti- 
ment and imagination that they would not hesitate to 
stamp out the last beautiful thing on earth, if its 
beauty, or some sentiment connected with it which 
made it seem beautiful, is the only reason or the only 
excuse that can be given for its existence. But all 
are not of this character, and to those who have 
something besides Cornish tin and copper in their 
souls, who are not wholly devoted to their own and, 
incidentally, to their county's, material prosperity, I 
would appeal to rescue from degradation and to pre- 
serve unspoilt for all time this precious spot to which 
pilgrims resort from all the land. 

It is not necessary, I hope, to describe the Land's 
End as the county's best " asset " or as the " goose 



316 THE LAND'S END 

that lays the golden eggs ", or by some such abomin- 
able phrase, which is yet well understood by all since 
it appeals to the baser nature in every man — to his 
greed and his cunning ; still, it might be well to 
remind even those who are wholly concerned with 
material things that the sentiment they make light of 
probably exists in some degree in a majority of the 
inhabitants of this country — which, be it remembered, 
is mainly Anglo-Saxon, a sentimental race, to use the 
word in its better sense — and that it is the desire 
of most persons to see the Land's End ; also that 
probably nine of every ten visitors to Cornwall think 
of that headland as their objective point. 

To save this spot it would undoubtedly have to be 
taken from private ownership ; and, given the desire, 
there would be small difficulty in obtaining an Act of 
Parliament for the compulsory sale of a strip of the 
sea-front with, let us say, a couple of thousand acres 
of the adjoining moor. The buildings which now 
deform the place, the unneeded hotels, with stables, 
shanties, zinc bungalows sprawling over the cliff, and 
the ugly big and little houses could be cleared away, 
leaving only the ancient village of St. Sennen, the 
old farm-houses, the coastguard and Trinity House 
stations, and the old fishing hamlet under the cliff. 

If a Cornish Society, formed for the purpose, and 
working with the County Council, could not do this 
without outside help, the money needed could no 
doubt be easily raised by public subscription. We 
know that very large sums are frequently given by 
the public for similar purposes, also for various other 



PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END 317 

purposes which appeal to comparatively very few, as, 
for example, when the sum of ^45,000 was recently 
given by private subscribers to purchase the Rokeby 
" Venus " for the National Gallery. Yet for every 
single subscriber to that fund, and, I may say, for 
every person in England who regards that canvas as 
a valuable acquisition, there are probably thousands 
who would gladly see the Land's End made a National 
possession, and who would willingly subscribe for 
such an object. 




INDEX 



Adder, coming forth in winter, 4, 
205 ; singular colouring of, 
269 

Badger, strange action of a, 249 
Bibliotheca Comubiensis, 187 
Birds, a memory of, 1 1 ; feeding 

the, at St. Ives, 14; wintering 

in West Cornwall, 89-101 ; 

flying from the frost, 210; 

cruelties practised on, 2 1 2-14 ; 

crippled, 114, 217; visitation 

of, 222 ; effect of great frost 

on, 226 
Blackbird, 92, 225 ; distress of, on 

washing-day, 270 
Blackthorn, 42 
Bolerium. See Land's End 
Books on Cornwall, 55-7, 130, 

i3 6 ~7> 3o8 
Borde, Andrew, on Cornish 

speech, 107 
Borlase, William, on the Cornish 

seal, 2154-5 
Bottrell, William, Stories and 

Folklore of West Cornwall, 1 96 
Bracken, colour of dead, 206 
Brett, the marine artist, story of, 

170 
Browning, Drainat." !>'> Hs, 82 
Bunting. See Co .ting and 

Yellowhammer 
Burgomaster, Glau' 1 ull, 2 3 
Bush-beating, 2 14 
Buttercup, beauty - ,288 

Calderon's Life's a m t 66 



Campbell, Rev. R. J., on drunken- 
ness, 127 

Cape Cornwall, 43, 52 

Carew, Richard, on Cornish 
farmers, 32; on cliff foxes, 
34; on tin-mining, 133; his 
book praised, 135-6, 187 

— Thomas, lyrist, a Cornishman, 
187 

Carter, Mr. R. H., story of a 
badger told by, 249 

Cassiterides (Scilly Islands), 305 

Castle-an-Dinas, 273 

Chaffinch, as a rare bird, 246 

Chapel Cam Brea, 54 

Charlock, an admirer of, 280 

Chiffchaff, return and abundance 
of the, 269 

Children in Cornwall, love of, 
7 ; lost, 8 ; power of, 1 1 8-20 

Collins, Wilkie, on the Land's 
End, 54 

Colt's-foot, sweet-scented, 276-9 

Columbine, wild, 283 

Conger eel, fight with seal, 252 

Connemara, Cornwall's, 29 

Corn bunting, winter singing of, 
3,268 

Cornish speech, 104 

Courtney, Lord, on West Corn- 
wall, 194 

Courthope, Paradise of Birds, 267 

Cows, Cornish breed, 23, 43 ; in 
Penzance market, 122-4 

Cruelty, charge of, 144-6 ; prac- 
tised on birds, 212-14 



[19 



3 2 ° 



THE LAND'S END 



Curlew, wintering, 44. ; killed by 
sparrow-hawk, 252 

Darwin, an incident related by, 8 2 

Davy, Sir Humphry, on the Land's 
End, 57 

Dazvn in Britain, The. See 
Doughty 

Daws, feeding the, at St. Ives, 
12-18; on the cliffs, 65; 
the donkey's friends, 9 1 ; feed- 
ing the, at Zennor, 225 ; after 
the great frost, 238 ; impu- 
dence of, 266 

Dewar, Mr. G. A. B., on great 
bird visitation, 2 1 1 

Dog, a greedy sheep-, 1 4 ; and 
fox, 34; cunning of, 181 

Dogfish, 23 

Donkey, the Land's End, 90 ; 
daws' friendship with, 92 

Doughty, Charles M., on " swart 
Belerians," 105 

Dunnock, 225 ; protecting nest 
of, 270 

Ebblethwaite, Mr., gull protection 
by, at St. Ives, 219-20 

Erythrina crista-galli, forest of, in 
bloom, 296 

Evelyn, John, on the furze, 294 

Expression in flowers, 290 

Farmers, Cornish, character of, 
36 ; tenacious of their hold- 
i n g s > 37> politics of, 110; 
their rough home-life, 1 1 4 

Feme, Sir John, on azure in 
blazonry, 291 

Field-fare, 44, 92, 223, 267 

Fire, furze and turf, 233 

Fishermen at St. Ives, 6 ; love 
of children, 7 

Fishing-boats, appearance at St. 
Ives, 10-12 



Flowers, in winter, 275 ; blue, 
283-6; glory of, 287-90; a 
secret of the charm of, 290 

Fox, Carew's account of the, 
34; cliff, 51; prowess of a, 
228-9 5 attacked by raven, 
230-1 

Fowls, 34; raided by fox, 228 

F ritillary, first sight of the wild, 
288 

Frogs, annual carnival of, 268-9 

Frost, birds driven by, 210; 
effect on bird-life, 223-39 

Fuller, Thomas, on England's 
" observables," 1 

Furze, an intractable plant, 42 ; 
as fuel, 116; first sight of, 
288; in literature, 294; as 
fodder, 294-5 ; beauty of the 
effect of contrast, 295 ; varia- 
tion in colour, 297 ; fragrance 
of, 298 ; Cornish, 300 ; in- 
tensity of colour in, 300-302 

Gannets, fishing methods of, 74-8 ; 
contrasted with gulls, 78 ; 
taking pilchards from the seine, 
82 ; preying on sand eels, 83 ; 
flight of, 85 ; disastrous acci- 
dent to, at Whitesand Bay, 86 

Gilpin, William, on Cornish 
scenery, 30, 194 

Godrevy Lighthouse, 242 

Goldcrest, wintering in West 
Cornwall, 97 

Goldfinches, autumn migration of, 
223 

Goonhilly Downs, 290 

Greybird. See Thrush 

Great Northern Diver, sudden 
attack on a gull by a, 80 ; in 
Hayle Estuary, 256 

Guillemot, preyed on by great 
black-backed gull, 251 ; mi- 
grating, 267 



INDEX 



321 



Guize-dancing at St. Ives, 176-8 
Gull, common, 20 

— black-backed, 20 

— black-headed, 20, 68 

— glaucous, a rare visitor, 23 

— great black-backed, 20 ; guil- 
lemot killed by, 251 ; colony 
of, at Land's End, 68 

Gurnard's Head, 525 a favourite 
haunt, 69 

Hake, Gordon, on wind-tormented 
trees, 4.2 

Hawker, of Morwenstow, Corn- 
wall's poet, 186 

Hayle Estuary, 240 

Headlands, appearance and wild 
life of, 50 ; birds of the, 65 

Heath fires, 233-4. 

Heather, glory of the, 288-9; 
Cornish, 290 

Hedges, character of English, 
39; Cornish stone, 43-9 ; ivy 
on, 46-8 

Hedge-sparrow. See Dunnock 

Hook, J. C, the artist, story of, 
192 

Hueffer, Mr. Ford Madox, on 
class divisions in England, 284 

Humour, Cornish, 150; adven- 
tures in search of, 154; quality 
of, 156; the funny man's, 
163 ; Cornish and English, 
166 ; unconscious, of two kinds, 
169 

Hunt, Robert, Popular Romances 
of the West of England, 196 

"Hunter's Vision," the, 72 

Hyacinth, wild, first sight of, 288 

Ivy, on stone hedges, 46-8 

Jackdaws. See Daws 
James, Prof. William, on drunken- 
ness, 128 



John Cocking. See Shag 
Kestrel, 232 

Land's End, 50 ; sentiment of 

the, 52 ; in books, 56; dark 

tempestuous evenings at, 58; 

the scene of ancient tragedies, 

61 ; fascination of the, 304; 

aged pilgrims at, 304 ; Mrs. 

G. L. Craik on the, 308 ; 

horde of trippers to, 312-13 ; 

an appeal concerning the, 314- 

17 
Lark, sky-, 92, 223 ; departure 

of, 267 
Launce, habits of, 83 ; preyed on 

by bass and pollack, 84 
Lelant, towans at, 226 ; ferry, 

242 
Linnaeus, on first seeing the furze 

in bloom, 298-9 
Lizard, lights of the, 59 
Logan Stone, 52, 75 
Longships Lighthouse, 59 

Madron, colt's-foot in church- 
yard at, 279 

Magpie, strange nesting-place of 
a, 96 ; language, 97 

Man, the small dark Cornish, 
103-4 ; blonde, 105 

Marazion, 29, 122 

Market Jew Street, 124 

Methodism, 60 ; politics of, 112; 
boast of, 130 ; early effect of, 
197-200; ugliness of, 200 

Montgomery, James, Pelican Is- 
land, 64 

Moore, Sturge, poem on "Wings" 
by, 66 

Morality, Cornish, 131, 141-4 

Mount's Bay, 123 

Mousehole, 29, 122 ; a girl at, 
283 



322 



THE LAND'S END 



Naturalist, a native, 243 
Newlyn, 29, 122 
Norden, on Cornish speech, 106 j 
on Cornish immorality, 142 

" One and All " spirit, 7 
Osprey at Hayle, 256 

Pasty, Cornish, 1 1 7 

Pearce, J. H., Cornish Drolls, 59 

Pelican, the British. See Gannet 

Pelican Island, 54 

Penzance, 29 ; procession of 

children at, 118; description 

of, 221-4 
Personifications of nature, 235-8 
Petasites fragrans. See Colt's-foot 
Phillack, 242 
Pig, the Cornish, 33, 44 
Pipit, rock, 70 ; herring gull's 

attack on, 1 33-4 
— meadow, 99-101 ; among the 

sandhills, 243 ; story of a, 258 
Poppy, the " Farmer's Glory," 

281 
Popular Romances of the West of 

England, 196 
Psamma arenaria, 241 
Puffins, migrating, 267 

Raven, 68, 102 ; attack on a fox, 

230-1 ; on migration, 232 ; 

early breeding, 264 
Razorbills, migrating, 267 
Redwings, 223 
Reid, Dr. Archdall, on the 

craving for drink, 128 
Robin, a maimed, 217; a second 

cripple, 225; a sacred bird, 272 
Rolfe, John, a Penzance botanist, 

277 

Saffron cake, 1 1 7 
St. Ives, climate of, 3 ; appear- 
ance of, 4 



St. Michael's Mount, 29 
St. Sennen, 54 ; Wesley preach- 
ing at, 57 ; the ancient Land's 

End village, 3 1 6 
Samphire gathering at Gurnard's 

Head, 70 
Sand-eel. See Launce 
Sandhills, 240 
Scawen, William, decay of old 

customs lamented by, 196-7 
Sea, colours of, 69 
Sea-rush at Hayle, 291 
Seal, struggle of, with conger, 

252 ; story of a young, 253-6 ; 

threatened destruction of colony, 

260 
Seine, 82 

Shag, 68 ; spring habits of, 262-4 
Shearwater, appearance when mi- 

_ grating, 267 
Silchester, Roman walls at, 45 
Singing, Cornish chapel, 109 
Smith, Baker Peter, Land's End 

described by, 56 
Sow, a friendly, 3 3 
Sparrows, 1 4 ; pit used as a 

roosting-place by, 94-6 
Sparrow-hawk, curlew killed by, 

252 
Speech, Cornish, 104 ; Norden 

on, 106; varieties of, 106-9 
Starlings, wintering, 44, 92, 223 ; 

starving, 233 ; after a great 

frost, 238 ; departure of, 267 
Stiles, Cornish, 32 
Sublimity, sense of, 67 
Survey of Cornwall. See Carew, 

Richard 
Swinburne on the whin, 298 

Tamar, River, 2, 61 

Tennyson on Celtic cruelty, 

Thiselton - Dyer, Sir William, 
294 



INDEX 



323 



Thrush, song, 92, 223 ; snail- 
eating by, during hard frost, 
226 ; after great frost, 238 ; 
departure of, 267 

— missel-, 44, 92 
Tinner (pied wagtail), 272 
Titlark. See Pipit 
Tol-Pedn-Penwith, cliffs at, 52 
Tonkin, on Cornish speech, 108 
Towednack, the village of, 158 
Towans, or sandhills, at Phillack, 

240 
Trees, in West Cornwall, 42-3 
Tregellas, J. T., writings of, 168 
Treryn (Treen) Dinas, 52 
Trip to the Far West, A, 56 
Turf as fuel, 1 1 6 

Unsentimental Journey through 
Cornwall, An, 308 

Vernal squill, 286-92 

Wagtail, grey, wintering, 44, 94, 
225 

— pied, 215, 225 ; anecdote of, 

272 



Wells-by-the-Sea, story of a 
pipit at, 258 

Wesley brothers, 60 ; John, visit 
to the Land's End, 57 ; effect 
of his preaching on the Cornish 
people, 132, 197-200; on 
mercy towards animals, 2 1 5 

Wheatear in December, 3 ; at 
the headlands, 70 ; first appear- 
ance of, 268 

White, Kirke, lines to the rose- 
mary, 282 

Whitesand Bay, destruction of 
gannets at, 86 

Willow wren, 269 

Winter heliotrope, 276 

Wolf Lighthouse, 59 

Woman preacher, 169 

Wrecking, the charge of, 146-5 1 

Wren, the Cornish, 97-9 ; effect 
of frost on, 223, 238 

Yellowhammer, 92-4 

Zennor, cliffs, 52 ; feeding the 
birds at, 224-6 ; a winter even- 
ing at, 233 



WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. 
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH 



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